North of the Wind
by kjanuary
Summary: The Moon may have set, but the Dragoons are still Dragoons: half-mad and doomed. Her faith broken, Miranda asks for miracles: to save her old friend Shana's life, or, if she fails, to save Dart's soul. 10/10 chapters done.
1. Heart Nailed To A Compass

[A/N: LoD is my mental playground, and this is a what-if that got way, way out of hand somewhere along the line. You can't really ask me to believe that the Dragoons were going to come out of that and lead normal, healthy, happy lives afterward! Comments are appreciated, hardly demanded.]

* * *

**NORTH OF THE WIND**

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Chapter One: Heart Nailed to a Compass

.

_Only tell me that you still want me here  
When I wander off out there  
To those hills of dust and heartbreak I go  
In that dry white ocean alone_

_But to stand with you in a ring of fire  
I'll forget the days gone by  
I'll protect your body and guard your soul  
From mirages in your sight  
_

_You are lost out in the desert_

[Anggun: Snow on the Sahara]

.

Outside the carriage, they can't hear us arguing. The loggers and sheep herders and merchants, the artisans and winebrewers and cheesemakers, all the beggars, lords, and thieves of Deningrad—they all have on their company smiles, their patriot cheers. They have enough to worry about, between the migrating bears and what looks to be a poor harvest.

I keep my voice low and my smile fixed. The Queen doesn't approve of this steel-shine grin of mine, but she isn't here. It's just her age that plagues her, the healers tell me, and there isn't a cure in the world for that. Small comfort when I hear her struggling for every breath, and teacups rattle in her hands. Today she is resting.

She rests, and we parade through the streets of Deningrad in her place. It's a test for the Sacred Sisters, especially for Wink, the Queen's chosen heir: one we all know she will pass. My third Sister was born to charm.

I'm less sure about the rest of us. Large crowds unsettle Luanna, who feels their inflamed emotions like fingers on her skin. Setie is whining. For my part, I can't get the image of the mountains out of my head, crowned with snow, calling me as strongly as they've ever called. The beasts there don't scare me as much as the thought of life without the Queen does.

Once, I climbed those mountains all the way to the top to meet a monster as old as Endiness itself, which had left its calling card in the rubble of my city. For some reason, I've had it in mind all day. I can almost hear it roaring in the back of my brain.

Today I have half a mind to leave my own marks on Deningrad's rebuilt walls. The pressure of restlessness and frustration within me threatens to split my skin open.

Setie kicks me. "Miranda, you're scaring them."

She's sulky because I took away her novel. I want her charming and attentive for this excursion, and Soa knows I'll box her ears if she lets the Queen down in front of everyone. Resentment seems better than her old crying fits—the one advantage, thus far, of the onset of puberty—until that pointy little toe gouges my shin. I hiss and duck out of the crowd's sight to grab the injury. I could leave a mark on her, too, and she knows it.

"Kick me again, pumpkinhead, and _then_ they'll have a reason to be scared."

"Setie, Miranda, please."

That's Wink, perched tight-lipped and white-faced on the highest seat at the back of the carriage. In this balmy spring breeze, we're all suffering in our fur-lined formal capes, but she looks ready to faint. "At least sit still," she says, barely moving her painted lips. She holds her head stiff to balance the Queen's heavy crown—the first time she has worn it in public.

I obey. I lock my knees together, fold my hands, and grin like a madwoman. I don't need Wink to make me feel like an unruly child.

I despise the immense sham of these public events. At home in the Palace, playing marbles in the library, or boating on the deep glacier-green lakes, I can be content. Trapped in the carriage, like a bug under a microscope, I have to see myself the way the world does: the Queen's cuckoo-bird, the misfit, unlovely and ungraceful and untamed.

Wink clears her throat. I stop the wolfish smile and rub my eyes. They hurt more than usual. I long for the mountains.

"Miranda, if you spent more time in the court, perhaps you wouldn't feel so out of place." Luanna, of course, can sense my mood. Nothing escapes her blind eyes: a blessing and a curse. She turns from the crowd to me, her expression perfectly modulated, which not even Wink can manage through years of practice before a looking-glass. The crowd never knows how much they frighten her. "Many people still find it strange for Wink to ascend to the throne, when she is younger than you."

"Then those people have been in hibernation too long," I snap back. "There was never any chance I'd be Queen."

"Not necessarily. What if Wink had died on Kashua Glacier?"

In the corner of my eye, Wink shivers. She hates for anyone to mention the accident. Only Setie still thinks it's out of fear. I never told Wink what became of the silver-haired man. I think I never will. She doesn't need more turmoil in her thoughts where Lloyd is concerned.

I have distractions enough of my own. Mountains. Battles. The Divine Dragon. The old battle-tremor ripples over my skin, under the sweat, though there's nothing here to fight except the deluded people who call me Sacred. Why does it come now?

Belatedly, I remember to answer Luanna. "Then we would all have crossed our fingers and our little toes and prayed Soa granted Setie a backbone."

To prove its existence, Setie kicks me again. Wink grabs my shoulder before I can retaliate. Her little lacquered nails look like drops of blood on the white foxfur cape. I jerk away. A whole screaming multitude of thoughts for which I have no words boils up inside: envy for her pretty face and dainty hands, for how easily grace comes to her; anger at seeing her sitting where Queen Theresa should sit; pity for the little flickers of fear behind her big blue eyes; shame at my own bad temper. I haven't behaved this badly in years.

"People are staring," Setie whines.

They will always stare.

Frustration adds the last straw. I stand up in the middle of the carriage, spooking the driver. The high-strung brutes drawing the carriage immediately veer to investigate a hanging bouquet, and the driver wrestles for control. I look Wink square in the face and tell her what I told the Queen years ago, when she first caught me, her wild bird, stealing bread from the kitchens to fuel the first of my many absences from the Crystal Palace.

"I love you, I'll fight for you, and do my damnedest to never hurt you. But if you expect more from me than being what I am, you'll always be disappointed."

It's for times like this that I insist on wearing a prince's dress tunic instead of the horrible billowing skirts like my other Sisters. I swing the long legs Soa gave me over the edge of the carriage, one after the other. A leap from the running board, and I thump down in the middle of some very startled Deningraders.

At the least, I don't trip. It is one of my better departures.

Throwing my cape back in a no-nonsense manner, I nod to the people around me and set off at full stride before I am accosted. From the carriage, Wink calls out to reassure them. "The First Sacred Sister has important matters of state requiring her urgent attention. Please do not be dismayed…"

Over her, though, comes Luanna's cry, like a knife between my ribs. "Miranda!"

Avoiding eyes, I walk for a while before asking myself where in Soa's blessed name I think I'm going. I have the answer by the next footfall: to the mountains.

You have neither traveling clothes, nor supplies, nor weapons (my wiser side objects), and you've just made the scandal of the year in the center of Mille Square.

There will be supplies in the wayshelters up the pass, I contend. I keep them stocked for this reason, although the highway patrols, woodcutters, and huntsmen express their mistaken gratitude.

You are a complete disgrace as a Sacred Sister.

Yeah, well, I'm one hell of a Dragoon.

I don't swear often anymore, and that shuts me up. Since the dawn of human history, there have only been eighteen humans to unite their souls with a monster's. I'm prouder of that fact than I am of being a Sacred Sister, the same way some cancer survivors are proud.

Still, I can't call any Dragoon a survivor yet, except for those already dead. There's no cure for this addiction. Just because we chased a long-dead tyrant across the globe, threw down the Moon itself from the sky, changed tidal patterns worldwide, done a roaring trade in secondhand weaponry from here to Serdio, and faced down the sum of all nightmares of eleven thousand years of dreams, doesn't mean I don't still feel the White-Silver Dragon's spirit stirring within me every now and then. I feel it waking today.

I rub my eyes again, savoring the old bitter pain. I need to leave Deningrad. That much is plain. I just don't know why I lost control so badly.

Wink isn't ready to replace Queen Theresa yet. She needs me. And I do love her—I do. I consider going back, while my feet keep me pointed steadily toward the stables on the edge of town. My name there is enough to acquire the fastest hooves in Mille Seseau. I might not even need them. Only monsters and Dragoons can fly.

Now that I have set out, the pressure inside won't let me turn around. As if my heart were nailed to a compass, I am compelled onward. Houses, streets, and faces blur past as I break into a run. My heart pounds, but it's racing no faster than my thoughts. For a dizzying moment I'm lost in time, and the echoes of the Divine Dragon's howl ring through my bones.

When I reach the city limits, all the jumbled pieces fall into place. The Dragoon in me stills. It hadn't been the mountains that called me.

In the courtyard of the great gatehouse, just before the stables, there _he_ stands, like a ghost in crimson armor. He faces up the street, as if he felt me on my way. His hair is longer now, the sandy grizzle of a beard coming in at his jaw, and those gray-blue eyes glitter in a way I know and never liked. He's road-stained, carrying only a bundle like a child in his arms.

"Miranda," he says.

"Dart," I say right back, stupidly. I'd thought a year under a moonless sky would have been time enough to find better words.

He holds out the bundle like an offering. It unfolds strangely. I still don't understand until he explains, an unfamiliar crackle of rust in his voice, "Shana's dying."


	2. Breathless

**NORTH OF THE WIND**

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Chapter Two: Breathless

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_On earth as in heaven, we will be strong together  
__On earth as in heaven, we will be untethered  
No martyr can ever divide our beating hearts_

_How I hold on, free from ever  
__Seeing your light  
Touched you, so loved you_

[Globus: Prelude]

.

Dusk falls in blaze-orange skies and purple shadows while we are still seven or eight miles out from the shelter. Alone, I could have made it, but not now that I have Dart, Shana, and a pair of Runners to consider. The Runners slow, unwilling to travel the treacherous mountain passes at night. If not for them, I probably would have transformed a mile outside the city limits. Runners, like all good sane natural creatures on Soa's earth, don't like Dragoons.

We find a promising nook between two great boulders split apart by ancient ice, which should keep out the worst of the night winds. A creek burbles nearby. "Tomorrow night we'll sleep in a real cabin," I say, dismounting. "For tonight, it will have to be like old times."

I didn't quite expect a smile, but Dart doesn't even seem to hear. He slides down from his mount's back without ever letting go of Shana. He moves more stiffly than the ride alone would make him.

His Runner shies away at once, eager to get away. It can feel the dragonfire leaking out of him, in flickers around his eyes and lips and fingernails. I tether both beasts at some distance and make camp alone--a poor camp, constructed with just my hands, a penknife, and a roll of canvas from the saddlebags for both groundsheet and windscreen. There is enough piney deadfall to make an evergreen roof over us, though I am covered in sweat, sap, and needles by the time it's finished. It's never taken so little time to ruin a set of clothes.

The whole time, Dart sits with his back against the granite, deaf and blind to the world. The girl in his arms never stirs, nor makes a sound.

It's a warm enough night. Once satisfied we won't die of exposure, I go over to the pair.

"Can I see her, Dart?"

I didn't waste any breath in Deningrad suggesting we take her to a house of healing; there are better doctors between here and Seles that he could have taken her to if he'd thought it beneficial. It lies clear as glass between us: he came to me as a Dragoon.

And the soul of the White-Silver Dragon is fully awake now, pressing against the insides of my ribs and the backs of my eyes. The scene in the carriage is almost forgotten. We're here again, monster-men in the mountains, power humming like a brewing storm all around us. I ache to let go and let white fire sweep over all of us.

Not yet. I crouch to examine the unconscious girl. His arms tighten the slightest bit. "Dart?" I say again, and with evident reluctance, he lets me pull the blankets away from her face and neck.

Her brow is cool (almost too cool) instead of feverish, like I expected. Her heart beats lightly as a dove's under my fingers. She looks terribly thin, but Dart won't let her go to be examined. He sits mute, reeking of pain, while I puzzle through my mental catalogue of wounds and signs of plague. Was she ill, had she fallen, when was the last time she ate? He doesn't answer.

I catch his eyes following my hands, so I know he hears. He just doesn't want to tell me.

It's as if he spent all the imagination he has just coming to me, all the way from their grubby little hamlet in the backwaters of Serdio, the place he never really wanted to leave even knowing he would never be content. There are just no words left in him. If I were Wink, I would know the right soothing things to say to coax him, but I can only be myself.

Here's the truth that the people of Mille Seseau haven't realized, and the Dragoons never asked. I am not a healer. I am not kind or gentle or peaceful, and I don't know the first damned thing about making anyone feel better. It's all the Dragon's doing.

It's different for me than it was for Shana, who really is sweet and tenderhearted, and hates seeing people hurt. I suspect the Dragon would have brought people back to life for her, if she ever had the nerve to try it. It _burns _in me, cold and clear and angry, because that's who I am.

I don't heal because I'm nice. All I can do is turn all that cold white light onto all the badness and hurt in a person, and burn it away because I am so furious with it and with myself, for all the badness in me that's never been cleaned away. But I don't know what I can do for Shana, and this poor idiot who loves her won't tell me.

My well of patience has never held more than one bucket's worth. Dart's lack of answers wins him no sympathy. "At least tell me when she got like this, you bonehead!" I hiss.

At that, his old-man, slate-blue eyes come up from Shana's waxy face. He's measured every sluggish heartbeat of that time.

"Almost two months since she went--still," he says slowly. "I left Seles that day. It started earlier. Maybe even when the Moon set."

A chill prickles my skin. I blame it on the coming night, folding my arms so he won't see. "How about you get a fire started, and tell me from the start," I order. He seems to respond better to commands. The irony hits me: Dart Feld is the only being in history to command the bloodlust and battlethirst of the Divine Dragon, and not be overwhelmed by it. I push away the thought of how far he's fallen.

Thank Soa I'm good at barking orders.

Settling Shana tenderly in her cocoon of blankets, he does as I say. He uses flint and tinder, like ordinary men, when I know he could burn the mountainside to a cinder if he wanted. He was never ambitious, like some of us. The warm glow licks up the edges of our camp as the last of the daylight leaves the sky.

The firelight carves ghost-sigils into his face while he speaks. From the way he begins his story, I rule out accident or injury as a cause. "She was quiet after we took her back from Melbu Frahma," he starts. "More'n usual, I mean. She's always been pretty quiet. She never talked about it later."

"Did you ever ask?"

"No." He frowns. "Why would I? If she wanted to talk about it, she would."

Men. An old, old surge of anger comes and goes. "Whatever. Go on. So she was quiet. Was she pretty happy otherwise?"

"I think so. She didn't smile much, but she said she was happy." Sitting beside her again, Dart smoothes his silent moonwife's hair, although only his touch disarrayed it in the first place. "She smiled at our wedding," he remembers aloud, softly.

I picture that homely plank-and-mud-brick-chapel, one rusty bell its only treasure--Dart in a Serdian groom's sky-blue jacket, hair brushed down with water. It's dangerous to dwell there. "And?" I probe, too sharply.

He doesn't notice. "We moved into my old teacher's house. Tasman died while we were away and left it to me in his will. She liked having our own place, talking like she never wanted to leave Seles again. A month after we got married, I took her to Bale to see Albert and Emille, but the whole time she kept looking around like she couldn't wait to go. Like she was lost. Emile was nice about it. Said Shana was probably just overwhelmed, you know, since we'd never seen Albert much as a king before, and here we were sleeping on golden sheets in the guest room. But when we went home, she kept looking around like that. Started standing in front of the mirror, touching her face over 'n over. Started…" He shuddered. "Started waking up in a panic, asking me where we were."

"How did she do as a wife?"

"Oh, you know Shana, all she ever wanted to do was cook and clean and have about a hundred Dart Juniors running around underfoot."

"It's the last part I was asking about," I interject. I keep my voice level.

Dart isn't as good as a Sacred Sister at hiding his blushes. He drops his eyes, sparing both of us. "Like any new wife, I guess," he answers. "She cried the first couple of times. I didn't hurt her or anything," he adds, quick, like a guilty man. "I love her. You know that. When she got spooky, like I was saying, I didn't want to push her, but she kept holding onto me, so I figured she was okay. I love her," he repeated.

I put another log on the fire. An old, old fear of the dark mumbles inside me. The night isn't full yet, but I learned when I was young to have a fire burning high and hot before the blackness settles in, so that you don't have to poke around in the dark for dry wood. "And then?"

"She kept getting quieter and more pulled in. She stopped leaving the house, at least when people were around, though sometimes I'd come back from work and she'd be out in the woods or up in the hills around town, all by herself. I was working with the rest, rebuilding Seles and tearing down Hellena Prison down the road. There was always something to do. But I'd find her just staring at the sky, or tilting her head like she heard things that weren't there. She began sleepwalking, too."

Dart pauses. Some vast-winged bird sweeps low overhead, just past the fire, and vanishes into the dusk. "I had to learn to cook. She wasn't up to it anymore. It got hard even persuading her to eat. I went to talk to the doctors in Bale and Lohan, and they just said she'd had a bad experience and she'd come out of it when she was good and ready."

"Was she still talking then?"

"A little. Just to me." He shakes his head, ghoul-eyed in the dim light. "It didn't always make sense. About Mayfil, like she'd seen it herself, and Shirley waiting thousands and thousands of years for her comrades to join her in peace. I remember one time her saying she wished she could haunt me like that. I didn't like the sound of that. She… she kissed my hands, and said not to worry, she didn't think she'd be able. A lot of talk like that. I'd want to talk about what to name our babies and she'd want to talk about souls. That wasn't like Shana."

"Maybe it's just a side of Shana you never saw before," I interject. After the White-Silver Dragon abandoned her and put its magnificent, exhilarating curse on me instead, I spent several three-candle nights in Wink's vacant room in the Crystal Palace, talking with Shana. I never forget those nights, any more than a man forgets falling in love.

But it's one of Dart's flaws to think in black and white, his opinions set in stone. He has one unalterable image in mind of his beloved. In the end, it hadn't been much of a stretch from little sister to bride. On the other hand, I can't shake my own impressions of the girl: haunted eyes and a smile not strong enough to hide the overwhelming air of tragedy that hangs about her.

Distracted, I'm not prepared for what Dart announces next. "She talked about you a few times, too, Miranda."

"Me? Why?" We weren't ever comrades.

"She liked you."

"Shana liked everyone." I correct both of us. "Likes."

"Not everyone. And she likes you extra special." He shrugs. "She said she was glad the Dragon left her while she could still see it, so she knew it went to someone stronger and braver."

Once, she entrusted them to me, as if I could do the least thing for the Dragoons except kill and bleed beside them. I can't even make up a single comforting word for her young husband, who clutches her like a dog guarding its supper.

He doesn't seem to notice the lack. Now he's talking, and it matters more to get the words out of him than for me to have anything valuable to trade.

"Then she pretty much stopped talking altogether," he continues. "She still listened, though. She'd nod or shake her head. Kept meeting my eyes the whole time, though if anyone else came over, she'd avoid them and hide in the bedroom until they left. People didn't visit much. That was about three months back. She slept a lot, and when she wasn't sleeping you'd think she was sleepwalking. I didn't know what to do, so I would just sit and hold her. I tried to take her to Shirley's shrine once, just in case, but she started crying and wouldn't let up when I tried to get her to leave the house."

I have two particular tones of voice, and a third most people never hear. The Dragoons mostly got the dry, cool, impatient tone. Now, sitting cross-legged across from my former comrade-in-arms and his bride, I fall into my diplomat's flat, disinterested tone. I learned it from watching men lie and feign assurance neither they nor I could claim. I talk as if I have some notion what's wrong, to give Dart confidence. "Did you go by yourself?"

"No." He wrinkles his brow. "I couldn't do that. I need to stay near her." And he holds her just a little closer. One of the Runners, which had been quietly tearing up the moss, lifts its head, ears back.

"What then?"

Dart presses his knuckles to his mouth and doesn't say anything for a little while. They're split and dirty, with dried blood deep in the cracks of skin. His eyes move from Shana to the fire and back again. When he does speak, he's quiet. I lean in to hear. His recounting is so vivid, so tangible, that I can almost see it myself.

"She was up and down for a few weeks. She could be pretty active, sitting with me in the kitchen, handing me stuff if I needed it. Then she'd go dead still and wouldn't look around even if I called. Wouldn't even get out of bed. I… I told people she was sick, even her folks, trying to keep them from coming in. Then this rumor went around that she was…" He swallows. "That she was pregnant. Going to have a child. That didn't help much.

"One night--"

He cuts off, rubs his thumb into his eyes. I think about putting my hand on his shoulder, but he goes on before I muscle through my hesitation. "One night I woke up all of a sudden and she wasn't next to me. The bed was still warm. I got up. She wasn't in the house, and the door was unlatched."

"You locked your door?" I hadn't thought Seles a large enough village to house thieves. Trespassing becomes awkward rapidly when one's cousin is the victim.

Dart nods uneasily. "I didn't want Shana wandering around. But that night she must have been clear enough to work the latch." The image of Shana locked in like an infant, like an animal, gives me chills.

But he isn't done. His nightmare is still rising. "I didn't even get shoes on, just ran out to find her. It was after midnight, hours still to go before dawn. This kind of night, it used to be bright as day in Seles, but now that the Moon's Set, I could barely see to walk. But at the edge of town I saw a little light, and followed it, and it was Shana in her nightgown, sitting on a rock on the hill that overlooks Seles.

"I went up. I thought she was sleepwalking, so I'd grabbed a robe for her. When I came up, she looked right at me. She spoke. She was all there for the first in I don't know how long. And I hoped." Dart puts his hand over his heart, nails digging into his shirt. "Soa _damn _it, I hoped. Especially when she said my name." We both look at Shana, filling in the voice we remember. "She said, 'Dart, I'm scared.'

"I hugged her as close as I could. She hadn't said anything to me in so long. I told her, don't be scared, I've got you. I'm not letting go.

"She said, 'I know you won't want to. I just don't think you'll have anything to hold onto.' So I held her tight, feeling her breathe. I didn't know what she was talking about, I was just happy that she was talking again. We sat and watched the sky get light in the east and the little moons set. I said that we should go home before people start waking up. She put her face up and kissed me, hard enough it hurt." Dart touched his lips, remembering, then laid the same finger across hers.

" 'Try not to love me too much when I'm gone.' "

He turns his face back to me with the worst grimace of a smile I've ever seen. "And that was it. She's never said another word. I carried her back to the house, but she was done. Wouldn't move, wouldn't even stand. Like she was asleep with her eyes open. I shut them myself.

"I left for Deningrad that afternoon."

His tale told, he refocuses on the pretty, lifeless little doll he brought to me. He digs his arms under her limp weight and resettles her onto his lap, keeping the blanket wrapped securely around her.

This isn't normal, isn't right, although who can say what is normal for a Dragoon? Or for a Moon Child?

I wait for him to ask me to save her. It hasn't crossed his tongue yet, though I've known it since I laid eyes on him. The soul of the Dragon is crying for release, hammering on the backs of my eyeballs and making my hands tremble with the need to surround and protect. I hold back. I seal my lips against the pressure. Even seeing his heartbreak, sharing his nightmare, there is too much that's proud and cold in me to make it easy for him.

Ask me, Dart, I command him silently. Deaf, he rocks his beloved like a dead baby.

After hearing scary stories as a child, my father would hold me in his arms until my heart stopped racing. Sometimes, the Queen still does. There are no arms here for me right now, so I lean back with my hands laced across my knees and jut my chin against the dark. "Dart, why didn't you take her to the Winglies?" The thought has been turning over in my mind for a while now. Their magic, and their wisdom of the strange things of the world, is greater than mine could ever be.

Dart snorts, surprising me with his bitterness. "The Winglies? They don't like us Dragoons. They'd have prodded and picked and probably done nothing at all."

I could never believe that the Winglies had forgiven the Dragoons for the Dragon Campaign, no matter how much they smile and offer their help and their too-sweet tea when their own lives are on the line. I didn't expect Dart to have the same insight. On the other hand, he did know Rose better than all of us, and Rose knew Winglies even better than Meru, who was one.

The wind chases the shadows down the mountain. The shelter I built keeps the sharpest gusts from reaching us, but enough curls around the sides of the boulders to flush sparks out of the coals. They rise like whirling red stars around us. I bat them aside before they can burn me. Dart ignores them, though they cluster thick as fireflies. He kisses just above Shana's ear, where the firelight glows golden-red on her dirty hair.

"Even Shirley couldn't help her, back when she fell sick," he muses aloud, "not as a ghost. It was the White-Silver Dragon's soul that saved her then. It was all I could think of. As soon as she went still, I couldn't get you out of my mind."

He's lifting his eyes to meet mine. I turn away just in time, biting my lips shut. We need more firewood--an excuse to avoid this moment.

No good. He follows, standing with Shana in his arms. She must weigh no more than a large doll. "Miranda, if anyone can help her, it's gonna be you," he insists.

My heart thumps with the Dragon's pulse. "Dart, I don't have the faintest idea what's wrong with her. Don't get your hopes up."

"You're the White-Silver Dragoon. You have all the power in the world."

"I never claimed--"

He drops to his knees, laying Shana at my feet like an offering to a goddess. As I recoil, he grabs my hand in both of his (such big, scarred hands!) The flames gleam along his face and armor.

"Please, Miranda, I need you."

Maybe it's the way Shana crumpled across my boots. Maybe it was the way he said please, begging like a little boy who's never wanted anything more. It could even be because I'm a fool who'll grasp at any chance to prove I'm any good to the world, whether my Sisters see it or not. It might just be that he touched my hand.

Whatever the reason, I surrender. The Dragoon takes over me.

The night turns brilliant around me. Every cinder radiates a thousand colors. Every pine needle and blade of grass becomes luminescent. As the light rises, I shut my eyes to keep from going blind. Still, I feel the White-Silver Dragon rising like the dawn inside. The warmth of Dragoon armor races from my chest to my fingertips, taking my turn and sweaty clothing and turning it to iridescent scales and living gold. I hold my breath to feel the shuddering weightlessness of bones hollowing, arching my back while wings of steel and gossamer reshape my human silhouette.

My feet leave the ground without a thought. I open my eyes to a world carved of gemstones, magnified in every detail. Darkness becomes a word without meaning. I can see the she-wolf, eyes glowing and fur rippling as she hunts four miles up the mountain, with equal clarity as the individual feathers of the owl roosting above our heads. The lights of the windows of the Crystal Palace seem as near as the cricket frozen in terror at my feet. The ache is gone.

I reach up and gather the light of the stars into my fists. I wrap the last glimmer of the sunset around my fingers like a ribbon. One freezes and the other is still faintly warm, and together they burn. They sing to me, the piping of the stars in harmony with the fading relentless bugle of the sun, so much sweeter now that the discordant thrum of the Moon That Never Sets has been silenced.

The Dragon, soul of light and tragedy, cries inside to add its song to this. Holding my breath becomes too hard. I throw my head back and yell. Even my hoarse voice is transfigured into music by the Dragoon's dawning.

With my razor eyes and my hands full of light, I look down at my companions. Dart Feld looks so small and brittle on his knees. The presence of the soul of the Divine Dragon emanates from his midsection like a bloodstain. Every cut and scar he has ever taken stands out so white on his sunburned skin that he looks stitched together. A patchwork man, I think, about to rip at the seams with the power and the grief inside.

I could put his eyes out with a touch, break in all his ribs with a blow. I could take his poor head between my nails and kiss his cracked lips. But his eyes are on Shana.

Shana, his bride.

Dart glows in my light, every vein and pulsing muscle laid bare before my eyes. Shana is gray. Her eyelids are as still as carved stone, where any dreamer's would have twitched with little visions. From what feels like miles above, suspended above the world by the unfurling of these broad wings, I count the pulses in her throat where the big arteries lie.

The blankets over her flat chest are still.

I bend down, weightless, transcendent, curling my knees up under me without ever touching ground. My hand looks like an angel's next to Dart's--like the sun itself beside Shana's colorless skin. I touch her eyelids with my fingertips and lay my palm under her nose and mouth. With the Dragon in my soul I reach out for anything to hold, something to fight on behalf of this sad, sweet girl.

Soa's sake, I search, white light overflowing from me like a bursting levee, and it flows and eddies around her and doesn't sink in. She slips through my fingers.

Dart whispers words I can't hear. My tongue is frozen to the roof of my mouth. If time stopped, I would feel less horror, but it crawls on. I feel it passing under my radiant fingers in the beating of Shana's baby-bird heart.

"Dart, she…"

"Yeah. I know."

She isn't breathing at all.


	3. Fire Down The Bones

**NORTH OF THE WIND**

.**  
**

Chapter Three: Fire Down The Bones

.

_God, there are guns growing out of our bones__  
God, every road takes us farther from home__  
All these men that you made__  
How we wither in the shade__  
Of your trees, on your wings__  
We are carried to the sea  
God, give us love in the time that we have_

[Iron & Wine: On Your Wings]

.

I wake disoriented, as usual, half-snared in a dream of my childhood.

I fell into a charcoal-burner's pit once, just before my mother left. It had been black, sleeping, so the pain that came flaring up from the embers startled worse than it hurt. I still feel the skin of my palm searing, beginning to blister, while I blink the dream away.

Dart is still sleeping, mouth open like a child, Shana between us. My left hand is on his arm, draped across her. I snatch it back and find my palm pink and blister-smooth, as if I had just grabbed a hot plate. I suck on the burned place for a minute, then gingerly touch his skin again. It feels like any other man's arm. Only the stinging remains to insist that this is not any ordinary man.

The mountain air is cold, the sky blue-white as new snow. It's a little after dawn, but light comes quickly on the heights. A lump on a branch overhead unfolds, and the bird from last night soars silently away. It's an osprey, a sea bird, far from its home.

I stamp feeling back into my feet--my hands don't need any more sensation--and spread my blanket over Dart and Shana. He always looked babyish in sleep, all slack-jawed softness, so far submerged in dreamland that not even Haschel's snores could wake him. Now he is wracked with little tremors, minute convulsions of hand and jaw. Predators do the same when they dream of the chase.

So this is what the Divine Dragon has done to him.

As for Shana--

The breathless stillness of last night is even more pronounced under the sunlight. I wonder if Dart is holding a corpse until I see the persistent little flutter in the hollow of her throat. The light also reveals the bruising under her eyes, the blue tinge to her lips.

There are little pins in her hair, disarrayed now, in the shapes of forget-me-nots. I can't decide if she put them there during the last days of lucidity, or if Dart himself did, clumsy in his tenderness. He holds her so tight that his fingers bruise her skinny white arms.

My hand throbs. I head off to the creek to wash up before I do something stupid, like cry or kick him.

The creek has the peculiar steely bite of glacial runoff. The source is probably the big ice sheet near the cabin. The cold strips the sting from my hand at once, leaving it numb. I drink deep. It's more refreshing than all the tea and sweet champagne in Deningrad. It doesn't help the headache, though, and my eyes have begun to ache again. The relief of turning Dragoon never lasts longer than the transformation.

By now, word will be sweeping through the hunters, poachers, and woodcutters who live near the capital: the First Sacred Sister is in the mountains. I try to keep them away. I don't know what I could do to someone if they startle me when I've gone Dragoon.

What's dangerous to them (and irritating to Wink and Setie, who don't think it's dignified) is a refuge to me. How can't I burn to trade the hustle, pressure, and insincerity of the city for the liberating solitude of the wilderness? To forget this ugly, awkward human body and aching eyes while the soul of the White-Silver Dragon makes me into something more beautiful and untouchable than my Sisters can imagine? I'm weightless, euphoric, addicted. The soul of this Dragon isn't angry, like the other Dragoons describe.

I'm the angry one.

Sometimes, it isn't enough just to fly through the passes with an eye out for rabid beasts or highway robbers. I fight the urge to return to Deningrad, a White Monster to take up the mantle Rose left behind. I'd walk through the streets like the light of Soa's own judgment on the thieves, the cutthroats, and the child molesters who can't dodge my inescapable Dragoon eyes. I'd castrate the men who cheat on their wives and put an arrow in the eye of every mother who beats her children. Maybe I will even fly over these mountains, ever north, to the foot of Kashua Glacier and the village in the deepest of woods where my father drank himself to death. This time I will burn the whole village down, not just the hovel I called home.

I don't, though; not this time. Dart needs me more than the vermin of the world need retribution.

I splash icy water over my face and neck. Wink always tells us to _blot _the face dry, not _wipe_, because stretching the skin creates wrinkles sooner. Defying the nagging in the back of my mind, I scrub my face as hard as I can and knot my hair out of my face. But I do it with good posture.

Dart is still asleep when I return: a human volcano lying dormant at my feet. I have half a thought of flicking the last drops of creekwater onto him, to see if they'll sizzle and steam. My palm feels normal now. Maybe I imagined it.

I flick water on him anyway. He grumbles and rolls to his other side, letting go of Shana. His hands curl into talons. He doesn't wake. For the first time, I can examine the girl he brought to me to save without Dart's ambivalence to interfere.

Pulling back the blankets, I feel like a mortician. I can't shake the thought that she isn't dying, she's already dead. This coma, or whatever malady of body or soul that has her in its grip, baffles me. That tremulous heart keeps beating somehow.

I chafe her hands, pull back her eyelids as if I know what to look for. Her pupils are dilated to the point that barely any brown shows. Her eyes are empty, like glass doll eyes. I close them, feeling profane. This is something sacred which I am manhandling. Her freckles are faded into her moonwhite skin. Only the burn scars from the Setting of the Moon remain clear. Dart has obviously been bathing her, but she still has dirt behind her ears.

Now I know why Dart has kept her swaddled like a baby, keeping me from looking too closely. Shana is skeletal. All flesh has melted from her never-sturdy body, and her skin stretches like tissue paper over blade-sharp bones. I run my fingers over her ribs. When I lift her arm, the joints feel loose, on the verge of separating. If I dropped it, the bones would ring and clatter. What I thought were bruises from Dart's grip are places where the blood is pooling and mottling the skin.

She looks like Queen Theresa, dying young. It's enough to make me want to cry again.

Here's a secret: I have always liked Shana. She's a simple backwater country girl with little imagination, painfully humble, painfully earnest, and as useful as soap in tough situations. Despite that, there is something about her that makes me feel calm inside, much the same as when I become the Dragoon.

I know I'm not the only one to feel it. All the Dragoons understood, except Meru, who doesn't have much use for serenity. Even Rose liked her in her own way. The Queen adores her. Shana is one of the few truly good-hearted people I have ever met.

Setie, who reads too much, doesn't understand it. "You should hate her," she told me once. "She's the one Dart's in love with."

I don't usually tell her things for this reason. "So? Albert married Emille, and I don't mind her--and Albert is what people would consider to be a more suitable match."

"For Wink, maybe," she said to be petty, and even though she's just a brat, I pinched her. Hating Shana because of Dart is more Meru's style, and I try to avoid doing things the way Meru would do them.

I told Setie later that life wasn't a storybook. It never has been. No fairy tale ends with the hero's true love turning into a corpse while her heart is still beating.

By the time Dart wakes, I've already fed and watered the Runners and dismantled the camp around him. Before anything else, he checks on Shana. For a minute, he just sits with his face pressed into her hair. The thought strikes me that he might be praying. Dart was never pious before.

"How is she doing?" I call over, as if she has no worse than a fever.

"About the same," he answers, as if he weren't holding an armful of bones.

He carries her over, bundled up again. The Runners shy away, more willing than us to admit how deeply wrong this morning is. Shana can't say a word, but her silence is deafening.

In a few hour's easy ride, we reach the wayshelter. It's a quiet ride. I have nothing to say. Even the normal sounds of the mountain seem subdued, as if the birds and small creatures that would ordinarily crowd around us are keeping their distance. It's a relief when the cabin comes in view. I paint its shingles red every spring for easy finding.

Built with its back against a ridge for a windbreak, it has a lean-to for Runners and muleoxen, but also an extra-wide door for when blizzard weather makes it too bitter outside for livestock. Like before, I take charge of the brutes while Dart carries in his little bone-bride.

Coming in, I find Dart with his hands on his hips, gazing around the interior. Shana is a ripple under the blankets on one of the two bunks. "This is a nice hideway," Dart says, scratching the stubble on his chin. "Is this a woodsman's shelter?"

"Mine, actually. Though they use it while I'm at the Palace."

I smooth my feet over the hard-packed earth floor--the same as in my childhood--taking stock of my haven, trying to see it from a stranger's eyes. The other guests leave their initials on the heavy boards of the table and benches, but otherwise keep it tidy. Each visitor lays the fire in the hearth for the next, and if I hear otherwise, there are fines. There is a pot, a skillet, and a pair of mugs and platters; a wood axe; a simple healer's kit.

In the corner is a miniature shrine to Soa, with an icon of the Divine Tree I carved myself. The Moon is caught in its branches. Dart is the first who might know what that signifies about my faith.

I built the shelves, too, which hold stoppered canisters of oats, sugar, dried cranberries, salt fish, and dried tea leaves. Queen Theresa also encouraged me to keep a few of my favorite books here. I don't come to the mountains to read, of course, but she is the only person who is in favor of me claiming this little space as my own. A little den in which my soul can find seclusion.

Dart is from the boondocks of southern Serdio, so I'm sure he knows dirt floors and the sour smell of blankets that only get washed every couple of months. He's only ever seen me in the Crystal Palace, though, or in the Dragoons' camp, when everyone slept on the ground. I brace for skepticism that I choose this freely. He just sighs, deep and long, and looks at me.

"This is nice," he repeats. "Homey."

"That was the intention."

He seems to actually focus on me now, for the first time since his rioting Dragoon soul dragged me out of Deningrad. Before now, he has only glanced around through the lens of Shana's illness. "You come out here a lot? What about being the First Sacred Sister?" he asks. "How've you been since everything happened?"

I rub my eyes and hunt down the kettle. Tea is always good, when there isn't anything stronger. "I survive," I say doggedly. "I don't assassinate my Sisters or burn down the city. Deningrad is fairly peaceful, even if someone vandalizes Bishop Dille's sanctuary every few months."

"How are Haschel and Kongol? Is Meru still with that poor Wingly guy?"

I shrug. "I don't know. I haven't heard from anyone." The water in the butt has scummed over. I scoop a kettleful from the center, where it's clearest, and drag the rest to the door to empty.

"I'm sorry," Dart says from behind me. "Oh... Emille and Albert are gonna have a baby."

Well, hurrah for them.

He lit the fire while my back was turned. I'm not sure this time whether he used ordinary flint and steel. My palm itches. Staring at the quickening flame, Dart adds quietly, "I guess I'd just assumed the Dragoons would stay close. I thought it was just 'cause of Shana I hadn't seen anyone."

I join him, squatting on the hearth. The spilled ashes of the previous fire make a black moat underfoot, marking the soles of our shoes. "You're the first visitor I've had since the Moon Set."

"I'm sorry," he says again.

"Don't be. I never did get very close to anyone. I am not an easy person to be friends with."

I don't intend to sound so bitter, or so needy. A moment of alarm flashes through me that he'll say something earnest and well-meant and deadly about him being my friend. Dart, thankfully, is not among the most perceptive of men, and says instead, "Well, you're strong in spite of it all. Shana always wanted to be more like that."

Again, we talk about her in the past tense. I'm more comfortable discussing my lack of friends than this. "At the least," I say, bringing us back to his first question, "I would be interested in knowing how everyone else handles being a Dragoon in normal life."

Dart sucks in a short, soft breath. "I don't."

"You're not curious?"

"I mean I don't handle it. I've never transformed since the Moon." He jabs the fire bare-handed. "How's Queen Theresa?"

The question crumbles the barren ground under me. "Not well," I say evenly, so he doesn't see how shaken I am inside. "Wink does most diplomatic functions and public appearances now. That's where I was when you came into town."

"What's wrong with her? Can't you cure her?"

"Don't you think I've tried?" I lower my voice, suddenly conscious of our third companion, as if I'd wake her. "The doctors say she's just getting old and we need to be grateful for the long, lovely life she's had. She says it's the will of Soa and no one can fight it."

"Bullshit," Dart says, so quietly I shouldn't have heard. He rubs his head.

I check the woodpile, also low. "If you chop kindling, I'll draw water." I glance Shana's direction on my way out, and bash my head on the lintel.

It's easy to talk to Dart, now that he's talking. He isn't subtle or especially careful about little quibbles over tact. He says what he means, and you just have to ignore offense because he never means any harm--not with words, at least. He expects you to do the same, so when you tell him something, he won't spend any amount of time puzzling over it.

Otherwise, he wouldn't have needed Melbu Frahma to reveal Rose as the Black Monster.

This is the way I like it. The change from the fawning cruelty and diplomatic doubletalk is refreshing. I have always preferred male company for this reason. Still, I won't pretend my abrupt departure is anything less than an escape. I run from the thought that has been whispering to me ever since I saw Dart standing there all grizzled and forlorn.

It's easy to sit there at the hearth, with him simple and honest and bleeding his poor stupid earnest heart all over. Easy to imagine he came to me for more reasons than a Dragoon's need. Too easy to hear the sweet girl he married neither breathing nor dying in the corner.

The compulsive mother-soul of the Dragon in me wants to wrap him up in its arms and never let him go. But the Miranda in me knows that I am dangerous. The only love I have to give is toxic.


	4. Ghosts On The Glacier

**NORTH OF THE WIND**

.

Chapter Four: Ghosts on the Glacier

.

_Summer, move forward and stitch me the fabric of fall  
Wrap life in the brilliance of death to humble us all__  
How sweet is the day, yet I'm craving a darkness__  
As I sit tucked away with my back to the wall_

_The taste of dried-up hopes in my mouth__  
And a landscape of merry and desperate drought__  
Once I knew myself, and with knowing came love__  
I would know love again if I had faith enough__  
Too far is next spring and her jubilant shout__  
So angels, inside is the only way out_

[Vienna Teng: Drought]

.

On the second morning, a pair of trappers invade my sanctuary. I hear them a little before noon, low unfamiliar voices outside, while I'm watching the kettle boil and waiting for Dart or Shana to wake. The trappers weren't expecting the cabin to be in use. They're discussing whether or not to help themselves to our Runners when I walk outside to confront them.

The first sees only a golden-haired woman alone, and his bristling eyebrows shoot up. His stouter companion other pays more attention to my scowl and the hatchet in my hand. " 'Scuze me, miss-didn't know anyone was at home," he says, bobbing his head.

"The First Sacred Sister of Mille Seseau is in residence here," I declare as frostily as any Sister can with her hair in a riot and three-days-old dress clothes sticking to her hide. I've had practice, though, and they believe me.

"Excuse me, _lady_," the chubby one corrects, elbowing his partner. "We didn't mean no disrespect."

I stare holes through them. I'm taller than both. "State your names and your business," I demand. Wink would have pardoned them first. They also might not have respected her, and this is how incidents begin.

I take note of their names; the pelts strapped to their packs verify their tale. They don't interest me. I cut them off in the middle of a long-winded explanation of their fortunes this season. "Have you any spare tunics or cloaks?"

"Er, yes, lady, but…"

"I will take them for my companions." I gesture imperiously downhill. "Return to Deningrad, and before you sell your wares, report to the Commander of the Holy Knights that Sacred Sister Miranda is well and in the company of the Dragoons." I pluralize it, although Shana can hardly be called that, or else rumors would fly about Dart and me. The trappers' eyes could stand to get a little wider yet, so I add, "I will consider not charging you for premeditating thievery upon my return." Then they are falling all over themselves to offer me whatever I like from their sad store of possessions.

Their patched clothing is rank with unwashed man-smell, but so is Dart's by now, and I'm little better. Once the gawping louts are on their way, I help myself to the thinner man's tunic and bearskin vest. They'll do for today, long enough to scrub my own clothes and the shirt Dart left on the floor and leave them to dry over a hedge. Still, I haven't itched like this since I was a girl.

Leaving Dart to keep watch over Shana, I wrap my cloak around my borrowed clothes and set out up the mountain. Usually, when I leave Deningrad, I spent the first few days cleaning and repairing the cabin and meditating at the shrine to Soa, and don't begin roaming until later. I don't have the tools with me to work on the cabin right now, though, and who could meditate with a flame-fingered Dragoon and an undying girl under the same roof?

I'll have to meditate with bow and arrow instead.

This section of the mountains has become as familiar as those where I was born, in the shadow of Kashua Glacier. First of all, I revisit the places where poachers lay their traps, by streams and deer paths. When I was a child I set such little letters of death, written with wire and snare, with my sad guilty father. Now I dismantle them. Twice I find rabbits caught in the snares. The first is frantic but uninjured, more or less, and I set it free to bound a little crookedly away over the slope. The second lies gasping with a barb through its neck. I break its spine and hang it from my quiver for supper.

I keep alert for prey as well as for the predators that might be unlucky enough to startle me. Mostly, though, I head for the glacial snowdrifts. They don't compare to Kashua in grandeur, of course, but they are nearly as old and have the same value to me. As I roam, I am also wandering toward them. I was born in a blizzard, a sense of snow ingrained, unlike Meru to whom ice is a treat for dessert or a trick Regole's soul loans her.

On my way, I whistle. I'm not hungry enough to worry about what I bag today. My Serdian visitors have left my stomach in knots.

The glacier bursts into view in a blaze of white, a perfect natural mirror for the sun. I shade my eyes and approach sidelong, or else it could blind me. The air takes on the peculiar clean, wet, still smell that I love. I breathe deep, and the image of Shana's white face, the smell of acid wrongness, fades away.

I lay bow and quiver aside and fling myself down in the shadow of the glacier, beside a rivulet of meltwater. Over my head arches azure ice, streaked with white like cloud. The sky is closer here, trapped under the ice. All around me echoes the music of history melting slowly to the sea. Soon the ground under me warms with my body's heat. I shut my eyes.

Oh Dart, you great big hopeless idiot, I think, why did you come to me? Any Dragoon could have failed him just as easily, and taken less harm from it.

I rub the heels of my eyes into my eyes. The sunbursts that follow look like the Divine Dragon's fire on the battleground of the Moon. I've never told the Queen or my Sisters about what Dart became that day-not when all of us still have nightmares about the Divine Dragon's roar alone shattered windows throughout the city. I understand Wink's feelings toward Lloyd better than she knows.

For a little while I simply lie there, basking in the glacier's shade and enjoying the singing of the birds. They're strangely quiet around the cabin. They must sense Shana dying inside. But my danger-sense won't let me rest long. My skin prickles with being watched.

I sit up, retrieving my bow. My human senses aren't as keen as those of the Dragon inside me, but still sharper than most folk. Still, I see no enemies approaching, nor wild beasts, nor Dart (and even without that lobster-red armor, he doesn't move with any sort of subtlety.) There is just the osprey, perched on a low-hanging limb some ten or fifteen yards away. Its presence doesn't seem to alarm the smaller birds, or the pika munching seeds on a boulder.

"This isn't your kind of wind," I tell it. "Now I'm sure you're following us." Maybe it spied Dart's armor while he and Shana sailed from Tiberoa.

The bird cocks its head sideways, predatory black eyes following my motions. I draw an arrow from the quiver and nock it to the bowstring. I have enough strangeness in my life without aberrant wildlife. I aim a shot to its right to spook it. "Fly away home," I tell it, and release the arrow.

A stray gust catches the arrow as it leaves the string. For an instant I think I'm about to hit the unlucky creature square in the breast. The osprey spreads its wings and dives from the branch, plummeting earthwards. The wind throws up a flurry of dead leaves in my face. When I lower my hand, a man stands there, the uniform of the First Knighthood of Serdio gleaming moss-green in the sunlight, a faded rosy bloodstain blooming across his chest.

After everything else, I am not afraid of ghosts, but the sight of this one rocks me like a punch to the jaw. The bow clatters to the ground. My knees buckle.

He bows his head politely. "It's all right," he says in that sunshine-and-summer-fields accent of the southeast. "You've got no reason to be afraid of me."

My father always told me that the soul was like a bird: peacocks for queens and saints, crows and cowbirds for the likes of him and me. A peasant's heresy, Bishop Dille told me; the official doctrine of Soa's Church regarding the afterlife is that we lie dreaming in the earth until our body melts away. I haven't known what to believe for a full year now. I've seen ghosts of soldiers still standing at their posts, souls drained and channeled like water in Mayfil's infernal pits. There is no room for the beloved dead in the branches of the Tree, though; the stillborn monsters of Soa's imagination would devour them.

What so many people in Endiness take on faith, I have seen with my own eyes and touched with my hands. Once, I was a true believer. The more I see, though, the less I understand. This world is a twisted one.

The Lavitz Slambert I remember is a tormented shade, suffering in the gloom of Mayfil, never to walk under the sun again. I've only seen him smile in oil paint on a piece of canvas that Dart kept inside his armor, with a hole now burned through the breast from the Setting of the Moon. I bite my tongue to bring moisture back into my mouth, and bite too hard. "I don't understand," I croak. "I thought you'd found your peace."

"That I did," Lavitz's ghost answers.

"How can you... Is there nothing after..."

"I'm watching over my comrades," he says. "Shirley waited eleven thousand years for her Dragoons to join her. I decided to wait as well."

Lavitz stands in the sunlight, solid-looking enough that the grass bends under his boots, but the light off the glacier cuts through him. He is still in a way no living person can ever be. The mountain around us is full of the sounds of small birds and forest creatures, but right here it seems so quiet that I just hear my rapid breathing and the absence of his.

On my knees, I flap my hand downhill in the general direction of the cabin. "You came from Serdio with Dart and Shana. You _were _following them."

"Following you too, Miranda. And the others. No one left behind. You're the first with eyes sharp enough to notice." For a moment the sun lays across his face, rather than behind it, and he's smiling.

My strength returns. I climb back to my feet and dust the dirt from my knees. "Then you know something's very wrong. With Shana."

"With Shana-well, her too. My poor little Shana." He forestalls me with a hand. "I wish I had the miracle fix for you, Miranda. I don't bring any great revelations. I'm still just Lavitz Slambert from Bale." He says it with such humility, almost embarrassment, as if that name wasn't being carved onto memorials this very moment. Knight, Dragoon, and faithful friend, in death as in life. I always envied the rest for having fought beside him.

But now, after his battles are done, it's me he visits. He says he has no answers for me. This isn't the part that crumbles my belief under me. I've always known Fate was a woman, and a bitch.

If the soul of Lavitz is free to go where souls go, and still lingers, then maybe there are still others who can tell me how to save Shana. "Where are the other Dragoons? Rose or Shirley might..."

He is shaking his head before I have finished the question, so I stop. "They've gone," he says. "All of them together, after all these years."

"What _does_-follow this?"

"I don't know yet." I'm relieved, a little; even that is better than some answers. Lavitz talks like a man at peace with his faith, not a ghost whose transient existence could come to an unknown end at any time.

Even dead, I suddenly envy him. He has already had his miracle and sold his life for something greater, while I'm left wondering my life could ever buy.

"If you don't know, then at least you can talk to me," I say, sitting again under the glacier lip. "I could use an ear." He follows; when he leaves the sunlight, he looks more fleshly and opaque, and simultaneously all the color leeches out of him. He remains standing. I have to look up toward his face. Standing, I'm taller.

He leans against the ice, insensate to the cold. "What are you thinking, Miranda?"

I study my ghostly companion's face, where bravery and kindness improve its homeliness. They say that dead men tell no tales. This one, I think, will hear my secret thoughts and never judge me for them.

"No one knows what's wrong with Shana, but somehow I'm supposed to make it all better. Dart doesn't see that I'm going to fail him. He just looks at her, and at me, with all this stupid hope in his eyes. I just want to punch him."

I turn a pebble around in my fingers and throw it at a nearby tree. It bounces off the trunk with a crack. "He doesn't realize we've been in the same shoes for the past few months. It's just the same as watching the Queen dying, except worse, because Shana's not even old." I glance up at Lavitz. "Except it's better, too. There's no one else watching and whispering and demanding things of me up here. Just Dart."

"Dart's the right kind of friend for you," Lavitz says.

I don't know what he means by that. "Boneheaded," I say, so I don't have to think about the alternatives. "Prone to fighting." We chuckle, and for a moment he looks real and alive.

It's a weak attempt at humor, though, and I lower my voice though no one else could be listening. "Even with all that's wrong, though, I was still-still happy to see him. I'd do anything if I could just heal Shana and send them home to their little village, but at the same time..." Honestly now, Miranda, I tell myself. "At the same time, I like having Dart here. That he came to me before anyone else, I just... I wouldn't care if we stayed on this mountain forever. But I think the price would be Shana's life, and I can't..."

The words are failing me. I don't know how to finish these thoughts in a way that makes sense, but Lavitz just nods slowly, like he understands all that I can't say. Maybe he does, if he's been watching us all. I try hard to put a coherent strand of thoughts together, and conclude, "Maybe Shana's already gone, and I'm not the terrible person I feel like right now."

"You judge yourself a little too hard. There are lots of people who admire the First Sacred Sister of Mille Seseau." He doesn't say anything about Shana's condition.

"Admiration isn't the same as affection." People have admired tyrants.

"The Queen and your Sisters love you."

"I left my Sisters in the middle of a public ruckus because I can't stand them trying to make me like them. They've got to be furious. I embarrassed all of us, and the Queen, too. When I come back there'll be hell to pay." Lavitz opens his mouth, and I cut him off. "I don't want to talk about them right now. I like my mountains better without the crowds."

He folds his arms over his chest. The rose stain of Lloyd's fatal stab remains visible. "There are the Dragoons," he reminds me gently. "You will always be one of us."

"You know, I thought I'd earned the right to be proud of that when we fought Melbu Frahma." I gaze up, past the green-blue lip of ice, to the place in the sky where the Moon once hung like a great opal. "Now I'm finding out how little power I really have."

"I thought the same thing when I died," he replies.

We lock eyes for a moment, remembering Mayfil. I turn my attention to chewing off a hangnail. The ghost is silent and patient beside me. I spit the fragment of nail to the side. There have been other thoughts keeping me awake.

"I'm worried about Dart, too. First the Black Monster, then Lloyd, then Zieg. He's always been single-minded, but now..." I can't say that he frightens me, not even to this ghost of a Dragoon who has almost certainly seen me lie sleepless at night, unable to close my eyes with Dart so near.

"You should be," Lavitz agrees. I start. "Dart's in danger. Caring for Shana is probably the only thing keeping him safe right now."

"Safe from what?"

"The Divine Dragon," he answers, and it strikes me that I have known this from the start.

"It wants him," Lavitz continues. "It's all tangled around that headstrong heart of his, just aching to let go. If it weren't for Shana, there would just be his own will standing between it and domination."

Dart is plenty bullheaded, but I've glimpsed the thing the Dragon could make him. Thank Soa that at the Moon, when it ruled him, all that hate and glee had been aimed at Frahma instead of us. The thought of it, set free once more, haunts my nightmares. "Love's strong, but it can't be that strong," I say.

"Not just love. He's a devotee of the Moon Child. We all are."

Lavitz says this so calmly that, at first, it seems like the most rational thing in the world. I'm nodding before my brain catches up. "Wait, what? That's impossible."

"Why did the Black Monster destroy entire towns just for having the bad fate to host the Moon Child?" he counters. "Everyone who comes into contact with the soul of the Virage Embryo is drawn to it. You who spent such a long time in contact with her, your comrade-you're bound to her, aren't you? You'd do anything for Shana."

"Almost anything," I correct him sharply, resisting the truth behind his words. All the while, a cold hard certainty settles into my heart. "It's not that, though. She's-she's a friend."

"She's that, too. We were blessed." He sighs. I hadn't known ghosts could sigh. Breath belongs to the living. "Other Moon Children have survived birth. Sometimes they reached adulthood. Some formed armies. Some conquered nations before the Black Monster brought them down. It's a quirk of fate, or Soa's will, if you prefer, that the one who escaped Rose's notice was the gentlest and humblest of girls. All she wanted to be loved, and all we could do was love her."

He refers to Shana in the past tense. I don't know if this phrasing is mere convention, or a sign. "And she loved Dart all her life," I finish softly.

"Yes." Lavitz nods, letting me follow that skein of thoughts to the end.

"They tell me that when they met again, he didn't think of her the same way, but in time he changed his mind."

"Yes."

"Did Dart have a choice to fall in love with her?"

"To tell you the truth, Miranda... I don't know."

He straightens and goes to the edge of the glacier, where the sunlight cuts through him like spears. "I told you, I don't have any more answers than you do where Shana is concerned. I've been watching and wondering, just the same as you. I want you all to lead long, happy lives before we follow Rose to what comes after, and I'm content to wait to find out." He gazes down the mountain with painfully clear regret. "But I suppose I'm not completely at peace after all. I'm afraid what will happen when Dart has no one anchoring him at all."

He glances back. "Dart is awake. You should probably go to him."

White fire ignites in my chest and rushes through me. The landscape around us blurs in a dizzying, gravity-defying whirl. In the blink of an eye, I have become the White-Silver Dragoon, the transformation triggered more by emotion than thought. Now I look down at Lavitz's ghost from even higher than before, my feet skimming just above the earth. These eyes are so sharp that I see his pupils contract against the brightness of me. He shades his eyes, although the light goes straight through his hand.

His smile is sad, and knowing. He understands what I've failed to put into words.

Wordless still, I descend low enough to pick up my fallen bow. A single beat of powerful, broad wings lifts me as high as the treetops. I turn away from the ghost and fly with lightning speed down the mountain, a white comet, a tiny second sun, too high above the earth for its heavy cruelty to weigh me down.

Dart sits outside on a fallen log, head in his hands, a rampart of wood chips surrounded his feet where he's whittled something into oblivion. No sign of Shana. Our clothes are still dripping on the hedge. He watches me descend, and the look on his face just about kills me. As soon as my feet touch earth, I am wholly human again and my eyes are stinging.

"I'd forgotten how pretty that Dragoon is," he says, which doesn't make it easier. I'm wearing some unwashed peasant's castoffs and I smell like uncured hides. He can't be talking about me until he adds, "Your hair's longer than I thought."

It's also snarled from flying. I focus on that instead of the sudden dangerous lurch in my chest, and sit beside him to untangle it. "I should chop it off," I mutter, "It's always in my eyes."

"Your eyes hurt, don't they?"

"Most of the time." I wear spectacles for reading and small work now, though never when anyone will see. I'm lightheaded with the quick transformations of soul and mind, the disjunction between talking with a ghostly comrade and now, the banalities of life.

He nods as if he understands, chewing the inside of his lip. "At the Moon, it got hard to see details," he confesses. I stop trying to comb my hair to listen. "Dragoons were alright, and Winglies too, and anything magical-even little things like Burn Outs-but human faces went blurry. Colors all weird. Like the ordinary world just faded."

"Everything looks different to Dragoons."

"No-I haven't transformed since then. That's how my world looks every day." His eyes are like blue coals. The last time I saw that hellish light behind any creature's eyes, the Divine Dragon had the rubble of my city caught in its claws. Dart goes on, while my hands curl into fists in my lap. "I knew it was you when we met at the gate, but I didn't see you clearly until just now. I could see Shana because there was another light in her. I meant it when I said she faded. I can barely see her anymore. That's why I like to hold onto her, making sure she's really there."

I'm not conscious of holding my breath until he turns toward the cabin and air rushes back into my lungs. "It's too quiet in there," he says. "Miranda, I'm so tired."

Then he sighs, and leans his head on my shoulder. We're the same height standing, but all my height is shins, so we fit surprisingly well. My shock over this observation delays my instinct to shove him away, and then he's so comfortable and warm and sad that I can't.

"I hear it," he murmurs. "It's always whispering in the back of my mind."

"Dart, Dragons aren't sentient."

"I know." But he doesn't retract what he said.

Not sure I want to stick my hand into this hornet's nest, I ask, "What does it say?"

"It wants to destroy."

I haven't been a Dragoon as long as the rest, and they had more or less figured out how the deal went down before I joined them. Still, I can tell that this is not at all right. Lavitz's warning echoes like a trumpet in the back of my mind.

With Dart this twisted-up and vulnerable, I have to be the steady one. I try to do this for my Sisters, the way Queen Theresa did for me, though I'm not as good. For now, I will hold my tongue about seeing Lavitz's ghost. We sit quiet for a little while: him heavy-headed and smelling just a little like woodsmoke, me disconcerted by how easily he fits against me.

After some time, his head grows heavier and his breathing slows in sleep. Before he loses his balance, I shift him to lie with his head on my knees. From there, I see the muscles twitch under the skin of his face, the shadows deepen under his eyes. I slide his red bandanna off and watch his brow furrow and smooth out again.

Careful, I warn myself. He looks so fragile, a warrior made out of tin, hollow and brittle. I can't imagine him as a husband. On the other hand, I never imagined that the Moon would fall from the sky.

I have found it difficult to find solace in churches since we killed Melbu Frahma. I don't know who it is that hears me, or whether Soa is interested in our little human hearts. I don't understand how the dead can have peace not yet knowing their God. Silently, desperately now, I pray for all of us, because Dart needs a miracle for Shana and I don't know how to give him one.

In this instant, though, one thought strikes me bright and clear as the sun itself: I'll be damned if I let the Divine Dragon take him.


	5. Flutter

[A/N: Thanks for everyone who's commented so far and made the writing of this more fun for me. It's been a slow beginning to a story, but I assure you that the second half (Ch 6-10) will get a lot more exciting. I'm hoping to get this done in the next three months, assuming this current bout of inspiration continues. And the excitement begins now... when Miranda finally realizes what's wrong with Shana.]

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**NORTH OF THE WIND**

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Chapter Five: Flutter

.

_Alone in our castle  
Alone in everything we have__  
I'll never see your face the way it is in our castle_

_So I kidnapped your sweet sparrow__  
So I am dancing around on your pain  
The hallways echo your longing  
We both know what needs to be done  
But something is holding on_

[Olivia Lufkin: Alone In Our Castle]

.

The weeks pass, and no envoys from Deningrad come up the mountain looking for me. Sometimes they do, if Luanna hears too many people talking about my absence, or if Wink needs to put the fear of my wrath into a courtier who's pushing too hard for favors, or just if they worry. The message I sent down with the trappers must have arrived in time. I'm not ungrateful for the extended reprieve.

It also means that the Queen's condition must be alright. If she worsened, they would send for me. I convince myself of that.

Meanwhile, in the mountains, we have peace of a sort. Dart tells me that Shana seems to be stable, though he keeps her bundled up out of my sight, and I don't second-guess his reports. Every morning and evening, he checks on her. I burn candles to the stubs in front of the icon of the Divine Tree, like someone with hope, remembering the branches withering around us. In this way, we settle into a type of routine. I visit a mountain village to acquire tools and clothes, and together we do what repairs we can on the cabin. We hike here and there across the slopes, up to the glacier toe and down into the ravines that are filling with the late spring's blooms. He doesn't come hunting, but otherwise we are together most of the time.

His face began to light up whenever I return to the cabin. I find myself lingering nearby more and more. It can't be good for him to sit musing over Shana's slow, mysterious decline all day long. Moreover, no one has ever been happy to see me before.

I never realized that Dart enjoys my caustic, black humor. My Sisters don't. It's good to hear him laugh. When he is with me, roaming through the woods or scrambling across the rocks of a foam-white river, the lines of worry and strain creasing his face don't seem quite so deep. They return when we cross the threshold into the cabin, so I try to keep him from spending much time there.

I tell myself, I'll be there for him no matter what happens with Shana.

In the evenings, when he lights our cookfire and the matchflame seems to cling to his fingers, I tell the Divine Dragon silently, I won't let you have him.

I can sense bad weather approaching fairly well, although not as precisely as Haschel. When a snowstorm is coming in, I make sure we have a healthy supply of firewood in the lean-to. We spend that evening watching the setting sun from an alpine meadow a few miles from the cabin, bundled up warmly against the coming night. The sky is murky blue, blanketed in a thickening coverlet of low, puffy clouds, lined with gold and fuschia silk. The first stars come and go in between the clouds.

The heat of Dart's head feels like a halo, an inch from my shoulder. We lie crook-legged like grasshoppers, side by side like brothers-in-arms. I'm aware of the irony.

By now he's made up for his silence on the first day. He's full of stories, thoughts, musings. He tells me things I didn't know about the other Dragoons before I joined them. Things about his childhood, about the months he spent in Haschel's company as a mercenary. Things you can do with cow pies, which I file away in the back of my mind for the next time Setie puts ink in my boots.

While he talks, I watch the sky for a far-roaming osprey. I still haven't told him about meeting Lavitz's ghost.

Tonight he's thinking about the house he and Shana have in Seles. "Until we finish digging out the root cellar we're piling up stuff under the bed and table. Never realized how much stuff appears when you move into a house! A lot of it's Tasman's, but I figure we might as well keep it.

"I went back to that tree we chopped down when we were hiding out from the Hellena wardens. Made a ladder out of it, so Shana can reach down the stuff hanging on the rafters. There's enough space under the roof to lay some boards down and make a loft..."

He rambles like this most of the time, talking about trivial things and small simple hopes for the future. It doesn't seem like Dart to be so invested in a place. I would have thought he'd taken one too many cracks on the head, if Lavitz hadn't stirred up thoughts of the Divine Dragon in my head. Now, instead of listening to the mind-numbingly boring things Dart goes on about, I listen to what he's _not _saying out loud. Dwelling on such ordinary matters, concentrating on a peaceful life, is his way of drowning out the monster in his soul. He distracts himself from the voice of devastation that must be calling constantly in his mind. For that reason, I don't begrudge him boring me to tears.

Besides, even if I weren't trying to save his soul, I would still owe him. For the first time in many years, I feel as if I have a true friend.

Granted, he'd be less of one if he knew how covetous I am of this time we're spending together, or the thoughts I've had of quietly letting Shana's remaining life melt away in the night. She would never hurt or wake or know. From what Dart said about her last lucid night, she knew something was wrong. Maybe it would be a relief for her.

She told me - just once - how it felt when Frahma brought her to the God of Destruction. If that's where she is now, trapped in the darkest, coldest recesses of the human mind, then as someone fond of her, I should set her free. And she wouldn't want to see Dart like this. Her love was (_is_, Miranda, I correct myself, but I can't make myself believe it) selfless even when it was needy.

But I don't. I sit up at night, rolling the White-Silver Dragon Stone between my palms, too afraid to go near. I _won't_, because I don't know what it would do to Dart, if I told him she was truly gone. Maybe I _can't_. Recalling what Lavitz said about the devotees of the Moon Child sends a chill down my spine.

I shake it off and try to catch the thread of what Dart has been saying. Something about paint - red and blue paint for the mantelpiece in the long-since-ash house in Neet where he was born. "I remembered it, and I always swore I'd have the same when I got my own place and a wife to share it," he muses wistfully. "Think it'd be pretty. That seem too fancy for Seles?" He pauses, and twists his head to look at me. "I don't recall if you ever..."

Our faces are only a few inches apart. I never noticed his tiny freckles before. The impulse strikes me, gross as it is, to wipe the grit from the corners of his eyes. His lips are chapped and very close. I jerk my chin away and stare fixedly at the sunset until the stupid urges pass.

"I've spent time in Serdio," I admit; it isn't something that often comes up in conversation. Something still comes over me when I hear the accent of that region. "Before Queen Theresa adopted me, I lived there for a little while."

Dart makes a curious sound. "I thought you grew up in Mille Seseau."

"I did. After my poppa died, I traveled for a while, trying to find where I fit in the world." I lace my fingers behind my head. This puts an elbow between Dart's face and mine. "I was fourteen," I add softly, remembering.

"How long did it take you to find your place?"

I bite my lip. "Not much longer, I hope."

"I know what you mean," Dart murmurs.

I hear rustling, and a minute later he sits up to rest his crossed arms on his knees. Behind his head, the last rays of the sun make a radiant crown. He looks very noble and very lost. "All my life I was looking. When I finally caught up to my Black Monster, even before we fought Melbu Frahma, I reckoned it was time to find where I wanted to settle down. It was with Shana. When we came back to Seles and saw them rebuilding the village chapel, I thought to myself, this is it. I've come home."

He sighs, the breath rattling up from the very depths of him. "At least, I wanted it to be home. Soa knows I've tried to make it so. I suppose it's a stupid thing to keep mulling over now that Shana's..." He stops himself there.

Now that Shana's _what_, Dart? I want to ask. What are you waiting for, up on this lonely mountain, now that the only miracle you thought was left in the world turned out to be just another sleight of hand? In the end, though, even I'm not vicious enough to ask him those questions.

Then he sighs and shakes it off. "What do _you _want, Miranda?"

"Nothing."

He's taken aback. "You've got to want something."

Haves, musts, shoulds. For a second, he reminds me of my Sisters and the officials and courtiers that swarm through the Crystal Palace like an enormous beehive, and me the hornet trapped inside. He's not one of them, though, just Dart Feld from Seles. I relent. "I want Queen Theresa to live forever and never be sad," I confess at last. "Other than that, I try not to want. It never goes well for me."

Dart scratches the stubble that's coming in ever thicker on his jawbone. "The things I wanted changed when I fell in love. Maybe they will for you, too."

I glance up at him, quick and hard. "I've been in love before."

"What happened?" He doesn't ask who.

"It didn't work out," I answer simply. "Even if he felt the same, I was already trapped. We couldn't be together."

"Can't Sacred Sisters get hitched?"

"We can take consorts. Even Wink. That's not what I meant, though. I was trapped in my own skin."

All the things I am hang in the air between us: Unkind. Untrusting. Impatient. Unlovely. Impure. Impious. My faithless, brutal mother's daughter, my guilty luckless father's child.

Bitch.

The last one - my long-hated mother's name - seems so loud that I wonder if I said it. Maybe I did. Dart, ever so compassionately, says, "That's not you, Miranda."

He looks at me, he's _looking _at me, all steel-blue eyes and sadness and need, Soa's sake I said I'll save him and now my heart is one big tangle of thorns inside my ribs. I think of Shana lying silent and lost, but a thousand other reckless thoughts stir up a blizzard in my head. Dart frowns - he sees the tension freezing me in place - he doesn't understand. He's still so innocent.

I don't know if it's my own innocence or the hard-learned sense of harder experiences, but I turn away again. Gritting my teeth, I glare holes through the clouds. In the deepening dusk I see, for the first time since that day on the glacier, a winged silhouette with the splayed finger-like pinions of an osprey. At once I scramble to my feet, kicking my blanket onto Dart. "Go back before it gets too dark," I order him. "I'm going for a walk."

He stands, still confused, holding my blanket and his own. "I thought you were afraid of the dark."

How the hell does he know that?

I shrug, tuck my chin, and head in the opposite direction from the cabin. Before I'm out of sight, I'm running. The cold air against my cheeks quickly douses the fire that had ignited there. I tell myself it's just the growing dark that makes my heart race. Racing like this, I'm likely to fall and crack my head wide open, spilling these thoughts onto the slopes for all to see.

Above the treeline, I find Lavitz sitting on a starlit outcrop, where the dusk breeze sings a sweet lullaby. There is a glow about him that I did not see in the daylight. My hands have curled into fists. "Where have you been?" I shout. My voice is ugly with anger I hadn't felt until this moment. It's always been this way: like an abused dog, I bite at any friendly hand. I suck in a breath through these careless fangs, but the vicious accusations keep coming beyond my control. "I looked for you. What if Shana had died?"

By starlight, the ghost is silver and more eerie than before. Constellations wink through the translucent plates of his armor. "I'm dead, Miranda," he reminds me, patiently, as if soothing a child's stormy rage. "I wish it were otherwise, but there's little I can do but watch."

"Where have you been?" I ask again, now whispering, a crack in my voice.

"With my king," he answers. "Emille gave birth to a princess this morning. They've named her Shirley." Touching his heart, he and adds wistfully, "The last time I saw Serdio, it was a battlefield."

I approach the outcrop, shoulder-high. "How are they?" Lavitz asks.

"Dart.." I shake my head. "Would you know if something happened here, with him or Shana?" I'm not sure whether it would ever be one and not the other.

"Yes. I'd sense it. He's like a brother to me."

"Dart," I repeat, twisting my face to hide my weakness. I lean my forehead against the stone, then slam both fists against it.

When I raise my head, for a moment I feel a chill, and see a blur of silver. Lavitz had leaned down to touch my shoulder, and my gesture briefly intersected my living body with his phantom one. He pulls back, but I reach up to wrap my fingers around his leg. My hand meets the half-imagined resistance of a soap bubble, then cold, then only the stone.

I stare at the place where my arm passes through him, wondering how it would look to Dragoon vision. This shade of Lavitz is here and yet not here, within touching distance and at the same time, completely unreachable. "I don't understand how these things happen," I say into the stone. "I don't get how someone can die and still be around. Other ghosts stay because they can't let go, but they're bound, not waiting like you and Shirley. It goes against everything I know, everything in the world."

"We're wrong for this world, Miranda."

He draws his legs up to stand. The wind rises like an icy crescendo, and the starlight seems to waver. His knight's uniform and armor shifts and grows like vines to cover him. A crown of thorns twists a circle around his brow. The light from his Dragoon wings covers the rubble-strewn slope with soft gray illumination. The Jade Dragon, or the memory of it, makes of him something different than I saw in King Albert. Lavitz is stronger, less delicate-looking, with the grace of a mighty war charger rather than a young stag. As with the ghosts in Vellweb, his soul retains the imprint of the Dragon that once ruled him. This is heresy that I see.

He steps off the edge of the outcrop and descends on silver wings, light as a breeze, to stand before me. He holds out his hand. The Dragon inside me stirs, as if dreaming, remembering him. I search his eyes, then stick my own hand out, braving what comes next.

Lavitz brings his palm up against mine. I almost feel it. At the same time, we curl our fingers to grip the other's. If I pull away, will I feel solid resistance, or only the wind? Neither of us moves.

Lavitz's smile is rueful. "I think the right to linger in this world must be Soa's only concession to us Dragoons," he murmurs. "We get a little extra time - maybe because of the second soul inside us when we die.

"We're wrong for this world," he repeats, even softer, as I go rigid. "In Kazas I hear folks talking about the wickedness of magic in human hands - they say it turns people into monsters. They mean us, Miranda. Of course, the first Dragoons they knew were Doel and Greham, but..."

"Stop. Stop!" I snatch my hand back, leaving a glowing afterimage in the air between us. "Lavitz, you - I - _I know what's wrong with Shana_."

"What?"

"She was the Moon Child. She was the Virage Embryo. You were talking about Dragoons, but it has nothing to do with being a Dragoon at all." I stop, shaking my head, trying for words to explain the awful thought that won't let go of my mind, its claws made sharp with inevitable truth. "The Winglies sealed the God of Destruction in the Crystal Sphere and the first Dragoons shattered it. Since then, every hundred and eight years - did you know this, Lavitz? Did you hear this in Kazas, in Serdio? - she was only the last.

"Melbu Frahma brought her to the Moon That Never sets so that the God of Destruction could finally be born. Body and soul together after eleven thousand years. And we killed it, Lavitz, we aborted it right at the moment of birth. _We _killed Shana. I don't know if she's dead yet, but we killed her." I'm shuddering, the words spilling faster and faster. "She wasn't ever meant to be human. The Moon Child was only the vessel for the soul of the Virage Embryo."

Lavitz's brow creases. I shake my fists at him impatiently, but my mouth opens and shuts several times before I can say it.

"Shana is dying because she has no soul anymore."

After several seconds of dead silence, he swears. Then, "Soa bless and forgive us."

"Where is Soa's will in this?" I shout back. "There's no one for you to be watching over inside that body! She'll never join the rest of us, not now and not beyond this world. She's already gone. She's been gone since the Moon Set and all Dart saw were the echoes."

He married a girl who was already on her way to the graveyard, with no rest awaiting her there.

"I have to go to Dart," I mutter, but while Lavitz and I have been speaking, the last light has gone from the sky. Night has swallowed up the mountain. I hadn't brought a lantern. I stare into the paralyzing blackness under the trees, thinking of the distance between me and the man who doesn't know how much he needs me. For all that my rooted feet can stir, it might as well be from here to the moon.

A breeze stirs the hair on my cheek. I glance over to find Lavitz's ghostly hand weightless on my shoulder, glowing a little deeper than starlight. "I'll guide you."

I am scarcely aware of the trip back down the mountain. My eyes remain fixed on Lavitz's ghost, a eerily comforting light against the bitter black. Meanwhile, my thoughts race through nightmare after nightmare. I'm afraid of walking in and finding Shana crumbled to dust in her shroud. Worse: Shana, soulless and undying, standing on the threshold waiting for me, a friend turned to a horror. Worst yet: finding the cabin burning and Dart gone, lost to the madness of the Divine Dragon. The fear grows with each step, as if by simply knowing I have set this into motion.

The cabin is not on fire, though. All is quiet and still. One of the Runners in the lean-to snorts as we pass. I shove all visions of terror and despair to the back of my mind and lift the latch of the cabin door. Nothing but darkness and more quietness inside. The ghost follows me, and by the faint light that radiates from the core of him, I see Dart sleeping as usual on the lower bunk, the bundled-up form of his little bride held under the crook of his arm.

I exhale, rubbing my temples. Lavitz stands by the bunk, gazing down at his former comrades. The silvery-green light from him makes all of us look spectral. "I did my duty by my king," he murmurs, although to which of us, I can't say. "Otherwise, it was a longer road I meant to walk with you."

He kneels by the side of the bed, folding up those vast shining wings that still disappear through the walls. I feel like an intruder, and hang back while he smoothes the blankets over Shana - a meaningless, ineffective gesture. Then the ghost leans down and presses his lips briefly to Dart's frowning brow.

"Be strong, little brother," he whispers.

The wind outside hums over the chimney like an empty bottle. One tendril winds down into the cabin, kicking up a flurry of gray ash from the hearth and sending it spinning into every corner of the room. Lavitz rises, fading as he does. He has vanished completely by the time he would be standing straight. The wind bangs the open door against the wall on its way back to the night. Beyond the door, in the starlight, the first airy flakes of snow are falling.

I shut and bolt the door and stand with my back against it. It's beyond imagining to think that there are now three bodies in this room, and only two people. Small wonder the White-Silver Dragon could do nothing when Dart begged: attempting to save Shana now would be like trying to resuscitate an empty building of cold, unloving stone. Now I understand why she had no breath. Breath comes from the soul.

Dart is sleeping beside something that only looks like the girl-bride he loves. The unpresence of Shana is contaminating all of us.

Still I stay, although by now everything rational in me wants to leave this crypt-like place. I stay because Dart doesn't even know what he has lost. He doesn't yet know how alone he is. I won't ever let him.

To climb up onto the second bunk might wake him. There's no more need to be afraid of disturbing Shana, even if a heart still beats inside those ribs. Instead, I pull down my blankets and stretch out on the floor. When he wakes in the morning, I'll be here beside him. The ghastly imaginings of before crowd around me, promising nightmares. I fight them back with better memories, of Shana smiling, Shana small and kind. Shana once saved the Queen from the destructive passion of the Divine Dragon. The first words out of her mouth were to ask if the Queen was all right. That gentle girl is gone entirely now. It's only right that I take my turn protecting the one she loved.

The arm that isn't holding Shana trails over the edge of the bed. Dart has long limbs, and his fingers nearly brush the floor. Impulsively, I take it. My fingers are chilled, and Dart's feel like heated metal against them. I only hold his hand for a minute before letting go again; I don't want to disturb his sleep.

As I release his hand, though, he squeezes mine. Only an instant; neither of us speaks. Then he lets go. I tuck my hand under my cheek for a pillow, and wait for sleep, warmed to the bitter core of me.

That night, my dreams are uneasy and unmemorable.

I come awake suddenly, aware of some crushing silence all around me. The cabin is aglow with diffused light, although the fireplace is dark. I push off the blankets and sit up, my breath leaving a thin white trail in the air. Frost silvers the windows, and now I recognize the cold, muffled quality of the stillness: a blanket of snow has fallen in the night to cover the mountain.

At once I check the bunk, but it's empty. Neither Dart nor Shana is there. I stumble to my feet, ready to search the snowy slopes, the Dragon's fierce protective power rising inside my chest. Before I get my boots on, though, I see Dart sitting in the shadowy far corner where I put the shrine of the Divine Tree. Shana lies across his lap. How he got both of them over there without waking me, I'm not sure.

My frantic pulse begins to slow. I set the boots down and glance out the window. Everything is white; there must be a good two or three inches outside, which is not much, but it's late in the season for snowfall. Dart's head is resting against the wall beside the shrine, and his eyes are closed. Maybe he went there to escape bad dreams, and fell asleep again. I take down the teapot, but I'm not hungry. My eyes keep lingering on him. Had he been awake, last night, when he held my hand? Or had he merely been dreaming?

"You're staring at me." His voice is soft and raspy. His eyes stay closed.

"Oh. I didn't think you were awake."

"It feels like needles… in the back of my head. What's eating you?"

"Nothing." I won't remind him, if he doesn't think of it on his own. "How's Shana?"

"Oh. She's, um, you know." Dart's tone is light, offhanded, ringing hollow and false. He looks up with nightmares in his eyes. "I don't feel her heartbeat anymore."


	6. Cinders Rising

[A/N: Six down. Four to go.]

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**NORTH OF THE WIND**

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Chapter Six: Cinders Rising

.

_Inside the labyrinth walls, there lies a tiny child who sleeps alone_  
_And as the daylight falls, the wind becomes so wild across the stone_  
_For I have made her prison be her every step away from me_  
_And this child I would destroy if you tried to set her free_

_So come to me, my love, I'll tap into your strength and drain it dry_  
_I can never have enough - For you, I'd burn the length and breadth of sky_  
_For it's my thoughts that bind me here, it's this love that I most fear_  
_And this child I would destroy, for I hold her pain most dear_

[Vienna Teng: My Medea]

.

"I don't want to just leave her in the ground."

"I know a place."

It takes us the entire day to haul the stock of firewood up the mountain - an exhausting gesture, but finding dry wood after a snowfall is more trouble than I care to know. After the first trip up and back, I chop down some long, bendy pine limbs and make something like a sledge. Soon we're sweating inside our clothes and the frosty bite of the air becomes a dangerous relief. A little before noon, a few more flurries of snow come floating down around us, lasting only a few minutes. I glance around for Dart; he's bareheaded, like I warned him not to be, and the snowflakes turn to steam when they touch his head and shoulders. He doesn't seem bothered by either the cold or the long, uphill hike, or the weight of the firewood we're dragging.

On the outcropping above the tree line, where Lavitz opened my eyes, we will cremate Shana's body. It seems right.

I've never built a funeral pyre before. While I'm sweating over the concept, Dart disappears. The somber actuality of what I'm doing gets lost in the difficulty of arranging what's going to be the biggest bonfire I've ever made. Shana's body becomes a thing, a weight and shape I have to factor in, rather than the corpse of a friend. By the time Dart returns, I'm hot, splintered, and cranky. "A little help would be nice" is on the tip of my tongue, when I see he's got his arms full of wilted frostbitten crocuses, glacier lilies, and bellflowers. There are trilliums in his collection, too - those won't bloom next year.

"Miranda," he says huskily - he hasn't said much today -"Thanks for taking care of everything."

Then what am I supposed to do except swallow the lump in my throat and carry on? We cover the pyre I've built with blossoms.

After everything else is done, we hike back to the cabin. We strip off our outer clothes, damp with snow and sweat, and bundle up in the rough blankets I portion out two stale oatcakes apiece from our dwindling supplies. Even with honey drizzled over, they taste like ash. Dart eats ravenously, like throwing food down a well without any gain. Then he stretches out on the floor, and I lean against the wall with my hands behind my head, and without intending, we both doze for a little while. There is no room in my head for dreams. It's the blessing of hard exercise: with our muscles so sore and our hands chafed and raw, it's impossible to think of deeper things. I've almost forgotten Shana entirely.

Then Dart shakes me awake. When my bleary eyes crack open, he moves his hand from my shoulder to my cheek. For an instant, it's warm. Then everything comes rushing back.

"It's getting dark," he says. "We need to go."

I make him dress warmer now, both of us in dry clothes, thanking Soa for the traders. I catch myself jamming a cap over his matted hair, like a mother, and snatch my hands back sharply. He half-smiles, like a dull razor cut across his lips, but his eyes are very far away.

He gathers up his wife's tiny, feather-light body. I light a lantern and jam through my belt all the remaining incense sticks for the shrine. If my prayers aren't answered tonight, I don't know when I'll ever have need of them again.

On our way up through the sunset, the wind turns wolfish. It rips at the fluttering edges of our clothes and sinks its teeth into all exposed skin. Unwise to be out in our condition, of course, but this isn't the time to be worried about catching cold. I take point with the lantern, trudging through the torn-up trail we've made with the sledge. Whenever I glance behind, Dart is following grimly, chin tucked, never raising his eyes.

The gusts grow worse when we reach the outcrop, without the shelter of trees to break its strength. It seems it is always night here. Holding Shana's shrouded body close, he stands gazing at the waiting pyre for several minutes without moving. My heart freezes up. I will him not to ask me again if there's anything the Dragoon in me can do. The best I can do is arrange a respectable funeral.

Please, Dart, please just let her go.

When he turns, my chin jerks up, ready to refuse. But he's hollow-eyed, not hopeful. Barely audible, he begs, "Can you do it, Miranda?"

The anger I've prepared in self-defense melts away. "Of course." He puts Shana's body in my arms - I brace for a weight which doesn't come - and I climb onto the pyre to lay in the place I arranged, among the driest wood and the flowers. I have conducted one other funeral in my life, my father's, also a cremation, but one without the dignity of this. Dart's love casts a veneer of beauty over this awful moment.

Because of his need, I loan the trappings of my faltering faith as well. Among the flowers, I stick the sticks of incense, turning the pyre into something like an altar. This is how the Moon Child will leave our world for the last time. "That's good," I hear Dart mutter behind me. I don't tell him the other reason I brought them: burning flesh is a vile smell.

I scramble back down for the lantern, tearing my breeches on a splinter on the return. Before I ignite the blaze, I pause to pull the shrouding sheet away from Shana's face. The sight sends a jolt through me. The declining condition of her empty body has accelerated since I last looked, the morning after Dart brought her to me. While her heart continued to beat, the body that held it - not decayed, that's not the word - mummified might be truer. The skin that clings to these bones is colorless, no thinner than ancient, crumbling silk. Her eyes are sunken, the mouth dark. Her hair has turned wispy and grayish, and some of it fell out when I pushed the sheet away.

This isn't a person anymore. This is more like petrified wood than a corpse. When I see that, one of the little choking fears inside me goes still: that somehow we'd guessed wrong, and that I was about to burn Shana alive. But there's no life in this. There hasn't been for a long time.

My hand is steady now. I open the door in the lantern and, one by one, kindle the upright incense sticks. The wind puts out the first before I've finished. I relight it, feeling Dart's eyes on my back. It's dizzying to be sitting here on a pyre, a flame in my hand, with the body of the girl who was the White-Silver Dragoon before me. She surrendered its soul to me; now I have two, and she has none. I'm alive and she's dead, and her husband is waiting for me to light her funeral fire.

I never said my own farewell to Shana.

I thought someday, when we're all old, we'd meet again. Even if my other comrades forgot me, I knew she wouldn't. I cup the lantern between my hands to protect it from the gusts and shut my eyes, imagining the sweet face I remember instead of this starved mask. I imagine a gentle, selfless soul sleeping inside this wasted body. I kiss her forehead, and for a second, I think of Lavitz calling Dart his brother.

Tonight, the three Sacred Sisters I left in Deningrad are strangers to me. Shana, deep inside, has been a baby sister to me all along.

I turn the flame of the lantern against the first piece of the dry wood. Pine needles make poor tinder, burning too fast, but I didn't have much of a choice. The smoke and smell of the incense rises around me. As if I were kneeling in the sanctum of the church in Deningrad, I tilt my head back and pray aloud. I skip the ritual, the Names of Soa, the litany of traditional praises and petitions.

"Everything I've been told about Fate and the Divine Will has either been dead wrong, or turned out to be twisted and terrible. It seems like there isn't a plan written in the stars, just chaos and nightmares." I kindle a fire in another place. "If You are real, and if You care at all, then all I ask is that You do something for Shana. For her and Dart, if not for me." A third, and now the first is beginning to catch and spread. "We've given up too much trying to keep this world You made from falling apart for You to just erase this girl from existence and not even grant her peaceful rest."

I set the lantern down in the middle of the pyre. "So." It's getting hot. "The worst excuse for a Sacred Sister of Mille Seseau is asking for a miracle."

I jump down from the pyre, smoky and a little singed. The fire spreads more quickly than I had expected, fanned by the wind now rather than extinguished. Cinders whirl up in glowing streaks of color. I remember Seles, Neet, all the villages and towns and cities that were burned by the Black Monster in her hunt for the Moon Child. Cremation is a fitting closure for Shana's life.

I wait. For what, I'm not sure.

I believe, harder than I have ever believed in anything, that some sign will come, some miracle, to fix this broken world from where we stand on the mountaintop. Some divine message from above to say that Shana didn't die without a soul.

I wait.

Whatever it is, though, it doesn't come. The flames cover the whole pyre now, bright as a mountain beacon. The smell of burning flesh that I expected doesn't come; the body burns dry as paper. The heat of it forces me to retreat. The scarlet glow of the flowers crumbling into coal burns my eyes. Stars explode wherever I look, lighting a thousand fires in echo to Shana's cremation.

There is no miracle for me. I know no god but the God of Destruction, before whose altar I now stand. We killed something that was in Shana, but the spirit of death and loss is immortal and unassailable. My plea means nothing. It'll be the same way when Queen Theresa dies.

So Shana's life ends.

Damn it all.

I grind the heels of my hands into my stinging eyes until the tears are dammed up again. Even though we are past the tree line, I can't leave a fire this big to die out on its own. Something could always catch, or the wind carry a hot ember too far. We could burn down the entire mountainside. I turn to Dart to tell him we should find a place out of the wind to wait it out, but I forget the words.

Fire is in his eyes and in his hair. The whirling cinders seem drawn to him, clustering like fireflies around him. They lay on his shoulders and his head like the snowflakes earlier, only white-hot, and he's impervious to the burn. At first I don't think he's moving at all, but then I see he's breathing fast, through his teeth.

He drags one foot, then the other, towards the pyre, as if in its core rests the entire world. Probably, in his mind, it does. But his fingers flex like claws at his sides, and his expression would give Setie nightmares. I look hard at his eyes, not sure why they look so strange, until I realize his pupils have contracted to mere pricks.

When he takes another step, I block him with my arm. The last thing I need tonight is Dart diving into the fire to pull her body out. For all I know, he may be too close to the dragon inside him to even be burned. What I couldn't stand is having to pry Shana out of his arms again when he realizes she's gone. I think it would break both of us.

Dart's stronger than I am. He grabs my wrist and twists my arm out of the way. He never looks away from the fire. He doesn't even see me. I'm an obstacle.

Damn _him_. I swore I'd save him, and I will.

So, since he doesn't notice me, I ball up my fist and punch him in the face. Dart may have drawn his sword a thousand times, but he never did much brawling. If it had been me facing Lloyd on Kashua Glacier, I would have shattered his face for threatening the Queen. When I punch Dart, he goes down hard.

He makes the strangest sound before he hits the ground - more like a dog yelping than a person in pain. I don't give him time to recover in case he means to fight me, or throw himself on Shana's pyre. He'd be stronger unless I turn Dragoon, in which case he'd do the same, and that I can't let happen. I twist his arm behind his back and pin him with a knee against his neck. It's for his own good.

I'm crying again, this time without a free hand to wipe the shame away. The fire burns white, like I've been infected with the same cursed vision as Dart. It sears my face, and all the snow near the pyre has evaporated. On the inside, though, I feel just frozen and empty. Even the dragon soul has gone so still I can barely feel it. Dart doesn't fight me, except to twist his head to watch the fire. I don't let up my grip.

The flames, having consumed all the wood and the dried-out husk of a girl, begin to die down. The only sound is Dart's labored breathing and the crackle of the fire. The wind has died down to a gentle breeze. Then I only hear the breeze.

The coals of Shana's pyre are still glowing white, although the coolness of the mountain night has replaced their heat. Against the dark sky, the smoke billows up like clouds of silver. It spreads out like vast wings unfurling, and I have a quick, bitter thought about my failure, as a Dragoon, to have prevented this miserable night.

Then it _is _wings - becoming clearer than imagination and wishful thinking can make them with every passing second. Like a silver knight stepped out of a dream, the ghost of Lavitz stands in the embers. I feel Dart's breath catch in his throat. I couldn't move if I wanted.

Lavitz doesn't speak. His face is alight, obscuring whether he is even looking at us. He bends, reaching down among the ruins of the pyre. When he straightens, he is holding something in his arms, something so frail and faded that I see the stars and the mountainside through it. My heart clenches, my blood running hot and cold all through me.

It's Shana's soul.

Draped doll-like over his arms, translucent as glass, it's barely there. At any moment, it could flicker out like the funereal fire. But it's Shana without a doubt. As Lavitz holds her close against his bloodstained, ghostly heart, she seems to gain strength and solidity. If I could walk through the fire, I could touch her. I see the silky-soft hair falling over the crook of his arm. I see the tiny freckles scattered over her nose and shoulders. I see the feathery eyelashes lying over her cheeks, as if in another moment they will flutter open and she'll wake.

The white light that had been in the embers is now all around them. Lavitz stretches out his ghostly wings, the wind sweeps around and lifts him up like the hands of God, and they're gone.

In the last moment, I think I see the little limp hand stir to cling to Lavitz's neck.

It seems like a very long time before I breathe or move or feel again. Dart grunts when I tumble off his back, and I hiss at the sudden stabbing of pins and needles all over me. Only the faintest ruddy glow remains among the ashes of the pyre, cold now for all the blazing power it held before. I don't understand how I can still see the outlines of the mountainside, and Dart lying by my side, until I realize that the night sky has turned gray with predawn light.

I'm drained to the dregs. All I can think is how numb I am for someone who has been given a miracle.

I roll over and squint at Dart. Blood has dried in rivulets all down his mouth and stubbly chin from where I socked him in the nose. I think there are tear-tracks, as well, and his eyes are swollen and red. But he meets my gaze clearly, exhausted and heart-sick and grieving and totally Dart again.

I start to sit up, but quickly give it up as too much work. Instead, I reach over and wipe grit from his bloody mouth. "Come on, Dart," I say hoarsely, "I'm taking you home with me."


	7. Candle Under Glass

[A/N: Seven down. Three to go. Miranda brings Dart back down from the mountains, back to the life she left behind, but some things aren't easily forgotten.]

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**NORTH OF THE WIND**

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Chapter Seven: Candle Under Glass

.

_The fabric of your flesh, pure as a wedding dress_  
_Until I wrap myself inside your arms, I cannot rest_  
_The saints can't help me now, the ropes have been unbound_  
_I hunt for you with bloody feet across the hallowed ground_  
_And howl!_

[Florence & The Machine: Howl]

.

After six weeks of the resounding mountain quiet, the ruckus of the streets of Deningrad is deafening. The stifling funk of the streets chokes me. Pointless hurry or maddening complacency marks every face. They can't know real strain, real heartache, not when their biggest concern is a half per cent increase in taxes. I glance back at Dart, leading our Runners—his went lame trying to throw him—unwashed, threadbare, red-eyed. The only difference between us is his bristly unshaven jaw. These people look only half alive. We look half _dead._

Every time I come back to Deningrad, I'm a stranger. For the sake of the Queen's reputation I've knotted one of the spare shirts around my hair, hoping no one will identify the First Sacred Sister in this tall scarecrow. I'd rather wade through the gutters and reach the Crystal Palace like a beggar than be recognized.

As for Dart, not even his friends would recognize him now.

The snow that fell on the mountains never reached here. In the warm gusty sunshine, the streets are webbed with lines of flapping laundry. Rusty-backed chickens scurry about underfoot, pecking at the shiny bits of glass that are can still found between the cobblestones, almost two years after the Divine Dragon smashed through the Palace. "Smells like fresh bread," Dart says behind me. He eyes a baker's racks under a patched awning, where someone has tethered a yellow-eyed goat.

I snap my fingers in front of his face until I get his attention. "You'll get all the fresh bread you want in a bit—and none of the weevils. Come on."

We'll have the Runners returned later; they'd know me at the stables. But no one notices us in the crowd, no one points, no one mutters "There she is, the Queen's cuckoo-bird, the disgrace." We're almost in the shadow of the Crystal Palace—it doesn't stretch as far as it once did—when I spot a vermilion robe and come up short.

Dart collides with me. "Ow!"

"We're taking the long way," I say, shoving him toward the nearest alley. I don't think Bishop Dille has seen us yet, even if he could recognize us under all this grime. He and I have always been on good terms, better than any of my Sisters, and my stomach gives a funny twist at the thought of hiding from him. I couldn't even put the reason into words. All I know is that I don't want to talk to him just yet. If we took the straightest route to the Palace, we would walk right by the steps of his often-vandalized church.

The alley spits us out into a street parallel to the one we just left, only narrower, dustier, louder, and more crowded. The Queen's carriage could never make it through the press of bodies here. It smells like mercantile humanity, the sweat of people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps only to find no room to stand on the heights of prosperity.

I was robbed on these streets once, a mere kid still ashy from burning my father's body and the house he raised me in, before Queen Theresa found me.

I worm through a seething knot of people and almost get run over by a pushcart. At first glance I think it's loaded with baskets. They're birdcages, though: birdcages made of wire and wicker, birdcages heaped higher than my head in a teetering mountain, lashed together with twine. In that jumble, the birds are trembling, molting spots of color. "Songbirds for sale, beautiful songbirds," the peddler yips, but these pitiful creatures are mute.

I squeeze back against the crowd, giving him room to pass. Several dozen bright black eyes transfix me. Thoughts of my father's backcountry superstitions tumble through my head—thoughts of an osprey far from its home, of Lavitz's ghost waiting for me on the glacier—Shana's pyre—my God, whose are these eyes? Do we buy and sell the dead like we buy and sell the living?

This is absurd.

"Buy a pretty songbird, miss," the peddler wheedles. His brows shoot up when I can't stop laughing. In an instant, the dreamlike strangeness of the past few weeks is gone. I'm awake now.

And Dart's not behind me.

Backtracking, I find him cornered by a persistent little Tiberoan smuggler. Dart is transfixed by the bottle the man brandishes in his face, where some sort of colorful sea snake floats in alcohol, its red eyes blank and dead. "Caught it m'self, right off the reef like," the smuggler announces shamelessly. "Li'l bugger went near crazy in the net and bit hisself til he died, full up of his own poison."

I muscle between them and hook Dart's arm. "Hey, lady," the smuggler whines. I blast him with the most contemptuous look I have and haul Dart out of there.

"Miranda, the snake..."

"Shut up before someone hears. And check for your wallet." Maintaining my hold, I eye the crowd. "Dart, where are the Runners?"

He pauses. "Crap."

I'll have to take it out of the treasury. Wink is going to savage me for that. If that's the only reason, though, I'll consider my life a little more divinely smiled on than before. If she gets wind of me wandering through back alleys, grubby as an urchin, she might flay me on principle. Setie would like that.

All smiles: we reach the scullery door of the Crystal Palace without further incident. With no Runners left to worry about, I stride in bold and free past the guards. We're halfway through the servants' hall before anyone thinks to shove the butt end of a spear our way. "Beggars outside," a guard rumbles. "Sister Wincesca sees supplicants on third and fifth days only."

Soa blight them all. They're not even pretending Queen Theresa is ruling Mille Seseau anymore.

Seething, I rip the shirt off my hair and fling it at his feet. It smacks down in a weirdly solid, in-need-of-cleaning way, and a puff of dust, ash, and pollen floats up. "_First _Sacred Sister Miranda demands that you get that potsticker out of her face before she makes it a permanent fixture in your body!"

The guard, a tubby man with a yellow mustache, peers at me, then Dart, as if not sure to whom I refer. I swat the spear aside and grab him by the chinstrap of his helmet. "What's your name, man? What's your rank?"

"C-Criker," he gasps, looking to his fellow guards for backup. They don't stir. "Sergeant."

"Sergeant Criker, tell your superior that Sister Miranda assigns you latrine duty for a month for disrespecting a Sacred Sister and daughter of Queen Theresa." I twist the chinstrap a little tighter before shoving him away.

Behind me, someone mutters, "Yep, that's her all right." In my peripheral vision I glimpse someone hurtling up the stairs and out of sight.

Leaving Criker to wheeze, I turn back to Dart. He's eyeballing me quizzically, shaking his hand as if it hurts. Come to think of it, mine feels stiff. Then I realize I've been crushing his in mine ever since I dragged him away from the snake-merchant. "Come on and we'll get this muck cleaned off," I say, ignoring my burning ears. "Then maybe they'll feed us before Wink starts lecturing. There's no need to lie low now."

The tattletale must have had wings on their heels. We're less than halfway up the stair that join the servant quarters to the Palace proper, when a beribboned minor courtier (his name escapes me) clatters down to meet us. "Sister Miranda, Sister Wincesca has requested your immediate presence in the Grand Hall." He hesitates, eyes shifting to Dart. Evidently the messenger hadn't mentioned him.

We've gone into battle together before now, and he doesn't abandon me here. "I'll come with Miranda," Dart announces offhandedly, scratching his scalp. A few pine needles drift to the floor.

The courtier watches them fall, his expression sinking in unconscious parody. "Perhaps you wish to, ahem, refresh yourselves first..."

I flash a brittle smile. "I wouldn't want to keep _Sister Wincesca_ waiting."

The courtier can't keep up with my long strides the way Dart can, and he trails after us anxiously, aware of every footprint we leave behind. All I have to do is check in, survive a tongue-lashing, and then figure out what I'll do with Dart.

The Palace isn't as grand as it once was, even though masons from Fletz and glassmakers from Bale have done a respectable job patching or disguising the places where the Divine Dragon shattered Wingly-crafted crystal. It's more crowded now, too, with the two uppermost floors completely smashed. The Grand Hall is a euphemism for what used to be a ballroom, just off the second landing of the great stairs. At the highest surviving point of the Palace, the Throne Room itself remains empty, wind blowing through the gaps in its walls, waiting for Queen Theresa to recover or a new Queen to be crowned.

The Holy Knights posted outside recognize my stride and twitch to attention, spears angled away with proper reverence. A small herd of gentry is being shooed away, probably to spare them the sight of me. "I don't remember this place," Dart mutters, as I shove the heavy doors open ahead of the courtier.

A bristling wall of weaponry greets us. Every Holy Knight and guardsman in the room has formed a semicircle around the door, braced as if awaiting a mammoth to come rampaging through. I peer through the hedge of steel, past the Commander of the Holy Knights standing guard over by my Sisters, who have risen from their ornamented chairs on the dais. Cupping my hand around my mouth, I call, "This is why I don't come home."

Luanna puts her hand on the captain's shoulder. Her sightless seashell-white eyes seem fixed on Dart. "Miranda, who is with you?"

"It's Dragoon Dart," Setie pipes up, and the tension palpably drops. I think Wink says "That would explain it" to Luanna, but it's drowned out by the rattling din of swords being sheathed and spears lowered.

I shoulder aside the Knights still in my way and approach the dais. Standing on it, even Setie is taller than me, which grates. She hops down. For a moment I think she might even hug me. Before I've figured out what I'll do with my arms in that case, she backpedals, wrinkling her nose. "Ew, Miranda, you smell."

"You'd be no bed of roses if you'd been where I've been," I shoot back.

"Where's that? A pigsty?"

Dart steps up beside me. "She didn't sass this much, last I remember," he says to me.

"It's a recent development," I explain in an undertone. "If she doesn't grow out of it soon, she might not see her next birthday."

"You are dismissed to your posts, noble sirs," Wink says over me, addressing the Holy Knights. "Your attentive service has been noted." Then, while the room empties, she turns to me. I hate it when I have to look up at her.

Wink looks ever so pretty, almost seraphic, in teal and dark blue velvet with her hair up under a smaller version of Queen Theresa's gable hood. Her cheeks are delicately flushed. If she's mad, she hides it well. I'd be red as a beet and already yelling. That's why she wears the trimmed robes and the hood, and I stand here leaving dirty footprints on the rug. She makes me feel small in a way that has nothing to do with daises.

"Luanna said you'd be back today," she starts, pitching her voice so that it won't carry far. Her next sentence tells me how peeved she really is, even if she's smiling. "Queen Theresa has been worried. I was beginning to think that you've forgotten about us."

"It's my fault," Dart interrupts, coming to my defense. "I called her out of the city and kept her away all this time. Otherwise she'd have come back."

None of us really believe that, but Wink turns her smile on him. Her lips get a little thinner; she hasn't forgotten Dart's role in Lloyd's death (or what I told her was Lloyd's death, back in Vellweb), even if she's forgiven him for wounding her on Kashua Glacier. "It's a pleasure to see you again, Dragoon Dart—I hadn't recognized you at first."

No, but Luanna recognized what was inside of him. The urge to protect, to deny, rears up. I want him away from Luanna before she remembers the last time she sensed that eerie, destruction-bent soul.

I pivot on my heel and fix the maid who's been gawking through the doorway with my stare. "Draw a hot bath and fetch a change of clothing for the noble Dragoon Dart Feld. Likewise for myself. Dart, I'll find you after we take care of family business."

"I don't mind waiting."

"Family business," I repeat a little more firmly. "I'll be along soon." He catches on, pats my shoulder twice for reassurance, and goes.

The maid lingers a moment after he leaves. "Sister Miranda, I'm afraid the guest chambers aren't ready."

She says it cautiously; all of us still forget what was and was not destroyed by the Dragon, and I'm the most contentious about being reminded. This time, though, I didn't forget. I've had it in mind the whole journey back that Dart should stay where I can keep an eye on him, at least for a little while. He's a grieving man and this Palace can be cruel.

Besides, as a Dragoon, I'm the only one with any right to care for him.

"I'm aware. Have someone fix up a place for him in my room. Borrow Sister Setiana's settee if you must; she doesn't use it anyway."

"Hey!"

"And get him a proper meal," I finish. The maid bobs and disappears.

The Commander of the Holy Knights lingers by Wink's side. He's been pushing her patience lately, always a little too attentive and eager to please, making a big show of how devoted he is. "If Sister Luanna sensed danger from that man, Sister Wink, I would be happy to have a guard stationed by him," he declares, with a servile bow.

My lip curls. "You can keep your guard, commander. If a Dragoon meant any harm to this city, you couldn't stop them." Unintentionally, I just threatened him. I add, "You will treat my guest with respect. Dart Feld is a hero and a better man than anyone under your command." That didn't help. He bristles.

"Dismissed, commander," Wink interrupts mildly. "The Sacred Sisters will attend to their own concerns." When she issues orders with a smile so sweet, it's no wonder the Knights go moon-eyed for her. He blushes, bows again like a broken toy, and strides out.

Now that we're really alone, the angelic glow leaves Wink. Putting her hands on her hips, she shakes her head down at me. "Oh, Miranda," she sighs, sounding so very disappointed.

Setie copies her pose, but her little bun-shaped nose crinkles with a grin. Her eyes sparkle with mischief. In a sing-song tone, she remarks, "Sleeping in your room, huh? I thought Dart got married..."

"He was," I answer shortly. "She died. We burned her body two nights ago."

"Oh."

"Two nights ago, a bright light was reported on the nearest mountain," Wink muses.

"Yeah."

I don't have to stand before the dais, like a prisoner on trial; one of the gilt seats up there is mine. I step up and walk around it to the big bay window. Each pane has a frosted design of the Divine Tree in the center. I rest my forehead against the glass, gazing down on the streets and rooftops of the city I hate and call home. Those weeks on the mountain seem like a lifetime ago—a time like a dream, spent in another world that has nothing in common with this one. The Miranda of the mountains is gone, too. I'm a different person here.

I wonder what the weather is like in Serdio this time of year. What view does Dart have when he turns his eyes out the window of his little cottage?

In the ghostly reflection of the glass, Luanna approaches. Her hand rests on my shoulder. I turn and gently move it away. "I'm filthy," I warn. "You don't want to touch me right now."

"I'm only blind, Miranda," she reminds me. Wink can recreate the Queen's gracious, imperial poise, but Luanna is the only one of us to have inherited her fearless love. She sees in me what eyes couldn't discern. "You're troubled—there's grief around you, but it's been muddied with guilt and fear."

I squeeze the hand I'm still holding.

Our private conversation is cut short. Wink wouldn't drive me so crazy if it weren't for her need to know about (and control) everything that goes on around her. "I don't know what you were thinking," she begins, "vanishing for almost two months and coming back looking like a beggar. Do you think it's funny? Is the public opinion of the Sacred Sisters a joke to you?"

"No." I'm the joke here. Sullen, I fling myself down in my chair and drape my legs over the armrest, which doesn't make it any more comfortable. Already I miss Dart.

"People whisper about you and I can't stop them. All in all, you're missing for almost half of the year. How are we supposed to maintain order, or any sort of cohesive policy? The Queen lets you overrule Setie and me in decision-making, yet you aren't around Deningrad enough to understand the issues involved or put policies into practice."

During the lecture, my eyes have drifted down to watch flakes of mud dropping from my boots. I glance up to spot Setie mimicking my pose. Her legs don't come anywhere near the floor. She sticks her tongue out at me.

"Queen Theresa hasn't taken another consort because of you, even if it would mean good things for Mille Seseau. She always said she has you to fight for her honor. When you take off like that, how do you think it reflects on her?"

Now the lecture starts to sting. With all the self-control I have, I clamp my lips shut. Wink won't go on much longer if I can keep myself from roaring back.

This time, she does.

"Did you know that when she adopted Setie and I, she told us every day about the wonderful big sister we were going to have? You were somewhere off in Serdio then, but she told us so much about you that I couldn't wait to meet you. You were so brave and so strong. I really wish she had mentioned that you hate Deningrad and don't give a rotten fig for all she's given you!"

Anger bursts out of me like a thousand little knives, cutting my tongue free. "You don't understand!"

"You're right, I don't," she snaps right back. The shock halts the rest of my retort long enough for her to add, "I don't understand how you can gallivant off with strangers and abandon everything here."

Luanna tries to intervene, but she has no practice in raising her voice. "Wink, Miranda, calm down. We will talk this out like civilized people."

I'm not civilized, just tamed, and right now the wild thing in me is thrashing in its chains. I sit up and thump my feet onto the floor. "I do what I have to do as a Dragoon. You don't see how important that is—you never have. There are only seven of us in the whole world."

"And there are only _four _Sacred Sisters!"

That dashes icewater on my burning anger. My teeth click closed on my tongue. My trembling hands knot into fists. Setie sits up and wraps her arms around her knees. She isn't laughing anymore.

Wink puts her hand on the back of my chair so that we're face to face. Her cheeks are redder than before, her eyes big and blue and welling up. There's an apology hiding under the accusations. "Do you want me to drive you away, Miranda?" she asks, softly now, her voice gone hoarse with strain. "Throw you out and disown you? I could never do that. You're my Sister. You're family. I'm only yelling because I love you."

If she had left it there, she might have broken me. She goes one step too far, though, when she finishes, "Maybe that word means nothing to you, but it means a great deal to me."

I stand up so fast that Wink would have gotten a bloody lip if she didn't jump back. Luanna steadies her before reaching out to me. I recoil. "I'm going to visit the Queen," I grit out. "See you at supper." I don't trust myself to say another word. If I start, we'll be bellowing at each other all day long.

The door of the Grand Hall slams behind me. The Holy Knights outside wear blank, wooden expressions; that lets me know they've heard every word. I punch holes through them with my eyes and stalk off to check on my bath. I need time to cool down before I see Queen Theresa; I don't want her to worry.

Half an hour later, the bath is full of gritty, smoke-colored water and I'm several shades lighter than before. I snarled at the too-helpful maids and scared them off, before it occurred to me that they might have lent a hand with my matted hair. They left me with fresh clothing laid out on a chair: crisply pressed breeches and a long jacket styled like the captain of the guard's, if he wore embroidered velvet, and (bless them) clean knickers. Everything smells like lavender soap.

There are perks to be the Queen's adopted daughter. Sometimes I have to leave for a while to remember them.

I wring out my hair the best I can and slip, barefooted, from the bath chamber to the Queen's room. I hear Dart's voice as I pass my room; Setie's harassing him. The smell of beef drifts up from the kitchen. He'll be fine for a little while longer. He's doing well for a newly widowed man.

Before the Divine Dragon, all of the Sisters lived in a wing that we shared with Queen Theresa. My room lay closest to the door, where I would be woken by (and then reckon with) any intruders. Then came Wink's, then Setie's nursery, and lastly Luanna, who slept in the room right beside the Queen's. With Luanna's psychic sensitivity, she had to sleep far from my nightmares.

That wing was demolished. Now we split up the remaining guestrooms, and leave the former consort's chambers for Queen Theresa. I don't like being so far from her. As I head up to visit her, knots of servants and guards stop whispering to watch me pass. I'm proud of myself, though. I didn't roar much. Caring for Dart has gentled me somehow.

A little trepidation grips me when I enter the Queen's bedroom. The doctors prescribed laudanum for her declining condition, and I've spent whole afternoons in the past waiting for her to wake. If she doesn't know me now, I don't think I could handle it. Her head is on the pillow, her eyes closed, and a book lies open facedown on her stomach. I sit on the edge of the bed, heart sinking.

Her hand stirs, then she opens her eyes and smiles at me. "I've been waiting for you, Miri," she whispers—the only one since my father died to nickname me. Her birdlike hands take and caress mine. "Forgive me for dozing off. I told the doctors this morning not to dose me. Luanna told me you would be coming back today, and I wanted to see you."

Silly, childish tears blur my sight. I scrape them away with my free hand. Her withered skin and hollowed face is too much like Shana's before we burned her, except she's still alive, still speaking, still smiling. Around her, the nightmares and the anger and the shame can't reach me; her unconditional love is my guardian. I blot my face dry and kiss her knuckles. "I'm sorry I took so long," I whisper back. It's hard to speak around the lump in my throat.

She pats my hand to forgive me. "You went to the mountains?" I nod. "They must be beautiful this time of year."

"I was with Dart Feld, the Dragoon. He came to Deningrad needing my help."

"Did you help him?"

"I tried." Maybe _trying _would be the better word. "His little wife, Shana—she passed away. We cremated her remains up in the mountains."

A shadow crosses Queen Theresa's face. She remembers Shana fondly. She doesn't waste words trying to express the feeling, but a glittering line trickles down from the corner of one eye. Squeezing my hand again, she shakes her head. My Sisters didn't cry for Shana, although she gave herself completely to preserving their world.

"I'm sorry," I say again. Like a little child, I curl up on the covers next to her and put my arms around her. Moving the book aside, she strokes my hair. I want to tell her about arguing with Wink—about the horrible lightness of Shana's body—about the snake and the birds—about Bishop Dille's church—about Dart and the twisted-up feeling I have around him, but that can wait. Right now, I only need her to hold me in her arms and for us to breathe in sync.

"I had a dream about you, Miri," she murmurs after a bit. Her voice is very faint. She's gotten weaker since I left. If she refused the laudanum today, then she must be in terrible pain, but she'll never admit it.

"A dream?"

"You were flying..."

I wait for more, but she doesn't continue. After a minute of silence goes by, I raise my head. Her eyes have closed. Her chest rises and falls steadily with the graceful rhythm of sleep. My stomach growls, but I don't have any inclination to move now. I shut my eyes and let the afternoon creep past. Here, my world is as right as it is ever going to be.

Finally, when I'm too hungry to linger, I slip free, careful not to wake her. I glance around at the medical paraphernalia that has been gradually spreading through the room, like lichen, little by little. Potions and tinctures, infusions and needles. This is how death comes to normal people: slowly, inevitably, gently. I don't think I'll die gently.

What do you want, Miranda?

I want Queen Theresa to live forever and never be sad.

I sit for a minute, watching the flutter of her eyes under the silk-thin lids. It isn't only the fading condition that links Shana and the Queen in my mind. The heart-shaped bones of their faces are similar. I've lived this moment before, only two days back, with my heart a stone inside of me and no hope left in anything at all.

Again, I lean down and lay a kiss on a beloved forehead. Last time, it brought me a miracle. Maybe it will again.

Silently, I leave my adoptive mother to her rest, and return to my own room. The lamps have not been lit yet, but the curtains have been drawn back to let in the evening sun through the great wall of windows. Supper will be served soon. Dart must have gone down already. I head for the vanity to see if I left any hairbrushes unbroken. Someone would shoot me for a lion if I went out with this mane dripping down my back.

I hear my name, whispered softer than thought.

Something catches the corner of my eye, almost hidden in the deepest shadows of the room. Dart sits at my writing desk, head in his hands. My face heats. He calls me again, scarcely louder than before:

"Miranda..."

The room seems to drop several degrees. Without moving he peers up at me, blue eyes painfully bright, red-rimmed. They've scrubbed and shaved and dressed him, so he looks almost like a gentleman, rather than the grimy vagabond I've kept under my wing. With his hair combed back and those shadows in his face, he looks more like his father than ever. But he's still my Dart—boneheaded and lost as a little child.

I kneel so that our heads are level. "What's got you looking so gnawed on?"

"Miranda, it's calling me. I hear it."

He ducks his head, hand sliding down his chest, grasping vainly at the soul of the monster far away inside of him. I shake my head sharply, trying to yank him out of these thoughts. I shouldn't have left him for so long. "Stay with me now, Dart. Don't start talking crap like this. Dragons don't think or talk like people, they're just big predators."

"Then I'm losing my mind," he says, all choked like he's fighting tears, "because it knows my name."

Oh, hell with this.

I cover his ears, as if I could block out the voice he alone hears. His head comes up, bashing his nose into my chin. Both of us wince. He grunts, still sore from when I punched him. "If you've got to believe in something," I stammer, "then believe in me," and our faces crash together again in my clumsiness before I get my lips on his.

It's like kissing stone. I twist my fingers into his hair for a better grip—how long do you hold a kiss, anyway? He doesn't respond, other than a long, slow shudder. If it weren't for my hands covering his ears, I would run, but now we're both frozen.

Then his hands come up and grip my waist. They dig in painfully, like claws. A stupid wheezing noise escapes through my nose when he drags me close against his chest, between his bent legs. He smells like soap and heat. "D—" is all that gets out before his mouth covers mine, and it's my turn to shiver.

Inexperience and anxiety flavored my fumbling kiss. Some raw _hunger _fuels his. I hold on tightly to keep from being lost in it. He pulls me closer, lifting me half up off my knees, and a fire I've never known rushes down to my toes.

We'll never make it to supper.

Maybe I pulled, maybe he pushed. Abruptly, the chair is abandoned and we crash to the floor. My head hits the stone, followed by a rush of stars. I'm pinned by Dart's weight, his hands now fire, now ice. I can't get a breath. There are teeth in his kisses, no tenderness. He knows what he's doing and I just hold on. His strength overwhelms me. Shana's heart stopped beating three days ago and her husband is going to devour me.

I'm choking. The only air in my lungs comes from his. I'm crushed underneath him, ribs creaking, heart hammering against his. His knee is between mine. At some point I've stopped kissing him and started fighting to breathe. My grip in his hair might as well be caresses for all the good it does me. He's oblivious to my resistance. I've wanted to taste his lips for weeks but I didn't plan to die doing it.

Letting go of his hair, I work my hands between us, against his chest. If I can't shove him off, then at the least I'll make him feel it. The insides of my eyelids go splotchy and dark. I dig my nails in hard over his heart, until the skin breaks with a soundless snap and blood trickles hotly down my fingers.

The lips that were suffocating me break away. Lightheaded, I gulp air that tastes like the night of Shana's pyre. My head throbs.

Dart has both of my wrists now, staring at the drops of blood that stain both of our chests. He runs his tongue over his lips. "I can't," he breathes, horrified, as his pupils go to pinpricks. "I'm losing hold."

The red-rust stain spreads too rapidly across his shirt, crusting over and building on itself like cooling lava. It spatters across the floor and smokes—across my arms, and I almost scream at the acid burn. It becomes armor, shell, hide, and plating all in one, the hideous coloration of dried blood and old bone, already pitted and scored.

Dart arches his spine. His bones twist and branch, warping into alien shapes. Bladelike protrusions rip through the skin of his swelling arms, surrounding me. His hands become claws half as big as I am. Sickly pale light emanates from him, melting the colors from the walls.

He hunches over me and wings burst out of his back, not coalescing silently the way we knew, but ripping with a grinding shriek out of his own body. The weight of them bows him over, gasping. He catches himself and opens his eyes to mine—all seven staring, frantic, deadly eyes. I've seen those eyes in nightmares.

The Divine Dragon has him.

A breath burns my face, smelling like opened graves, blasting tears from my stinging eyes. "Dart!" I yell up into his ghastly white face, nose to nose. "Dart, come out of it!"

Useless. Fate doesn't smile, she laughs at me. Once turned Dragoon, even I can't find myself again until its impulse is spent, and this one won't let him go easily.

Neither will I.

I hammer on his shoulders, tearing my hands open on the thorny roughness of the Divine Dragoon's plating. He grabs a clawful of my scalp and stands. My feet dangle. The monster it makes of Dart is taller than any man. Its furled wings scrape the ceiling of my room.

Monster, accursed, bogeyman and horror, a vision from hell; but within the hideous mass of its armor it still wears Dart's face. I reach toward that face, scrabbling at any chance to turn him back. I'll kiss him until neither of us has breath left to live. I'll claw his eyes out to save him.

Among the crazed dragon eyes, the blue human pair search my face without recognition. Gentler than I thought possible, claws rake back the tangles that hang over my face. A voice emerges: too strangled, deep, and hollow to carry any remnants of a Serdian drawl.

"Sh... Sha... na. Shana..."

His eyes answer him while my throat is too dry for sound. I'm nothing like the girl he needs. He drops me.

Something pops in my shoulder when I hit the ground. No time to think about it. I scrabble to my knees, calling on the soul of the White-Silver Dragon. It flutters weakly inside me. I'll drag it out. Merciful Soa, the unstillable voice of doubt wails, it took seven of us to take down the Divine Dragon the first time, and only after Lloyd had wounded it. This hybrid creature killed a _god_.

The familiar glowing pulse rises in my fists, behind my eyelids. But I never get the chance. The Divine Dragoon draws a deep breath and _howls. _

The force of it—the anger and the pain—flings me sprawling. Before we killed the monster, its shrieking turned the strongest hearts to water. This close, it peels the muscles from my bones. I can't stand, can't even protect myself. The power of my Dragoon bleeds away beyond any recall. I hear the discordant shattering of all the windows in the room, all the glasses, all the mirrors—they come crashing to the floor in lethal shards. Then I can't hear anything but a high ringing.

The Divine Dragoon sweeps its clawed arm, splintering desk, chair, and a bedpost in a single reach. Move, Miranda, get out of here, I order myself, but I can't move. Forget wrenching Dart back to himself. All I want is not to die. Nothing has made me cower since I was a child. Now all I can do is lie at Death's feet, deaf and paralyzed, as helpless as a newborn.

It roars again—to me, a soundless gape of fanged jaws. When it flares out its wings, a billowing sheet of flame fills the room. I squeeze my eyes shut and feel my flesh sear.

Before my eyes, the world darkens, losing meaning.

Silent images come and go like visions from a nightmare. The Divine Dragoon stands at the ruined wall of windows, poised for flight; then it is gone, swallowed up by the fire of the setting sun. The canopy of the bed crumples, all in flames. The broken glass on the floor is colored red by the sunset, the spreading fire, and blood. It's probably mine.

I wish I could think clearly. It's hot, hard to breathe. My eyes hurt. I didn't get down from Shana's pyre in time. Dart needs me. Once upon a time, the Divine Dragon left the Crystal Palace in ruins and I couldn't stop it.

The door is open. White faces outside—guards, knights, servants—frozen, afraid to cross the threshold of Hell. Setie squirms through the crowd, trying to reach me. Wink appears suddenly hauling Setie back by her ear the way I would. Her mouth is open, shouting, but I can't hear. The Commander of the Holy Knights wades through the roaring flames. The world flickers out again before he reaches me.

Firelight dazzles off the crystal walls. These aren't my walls anymore. It's cool. I'm lying in the hallway, and men run past me with buckets of water. Too late, I want to say, but my mouth is dry and empty. He stole my breath from me and left smoke in its place.

My head is in Luanna's lap. Her blind eyes are full of tears. They fall onto my face and sear me like ice. I want to wipe them away, but I can't lift my hand. Don't cry, Luanna, not if I can't join you. I'm not able. I'm a dry husk, like a dead girl's body. Even if I could take away her tears, though, I couldn't take away what she knows. I brought home a monster, thinking I could keep it tame. Instead, I set it free.


	8. Reeling Through The Graves

[A/N: Sorry for the long delay. 8/10 chapters done! I hope to have the story completely finished by the end of 2010. Wish me luck, and enjoy the chapter! More of the Sacred Sisters, a few old faces, and the unhinging of a psyche.]

* * *

**NORTH OF THE WIND**

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Chapter Eight: Reeling Through The Bones

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_"There comes a time when the brain, flashing through constellations of conjecture,  
is in danger of losing itself in worlds from which there is no return."_

[Mervyn Peake: Boy In Darkness]_  
_

_"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,  
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."_

[Shakespeare: Hamlet]

.

I don't leave my room for three weeks after the Divine Dragon takes over Dart. Not my _own_ room, of course, which is in ruins, but Setie's; she moves in with Wink. I'm feverish, weak, nauseous. It's never taken me long to heal with the soul of the White-Silver Dragon cradling mine, but now I'm bedridden. I feel hollow inside. I can't find its phantom heartbeat, its steady inner light, at all. There's only the sad, sick, hateful Miranda-ness inside, and the relentless ache of my eyes.

During this time, I'm haunted by a recurring dream, one more gut-twistingly vivid than any merciful deity should allow. I dream about the Divine Dragon, lying in the jigsaw puzzle of its black acid blood, dying atop its mountain tomb. I know the scene—I stood here, a little more than a year ago. Only in this dream, the beast turns steel-blue eyes up to me, imploring, and Dart speaks through its shattered jaw.

"You did this," he says. "You did this."

Setie complains about being woken up by my screams. Luanna, who gets tangled up in nightmares like cobwebs, develops a permanent pinched look between her brows.

Worse than that is the dream where Dart is himself, and alive, and I am carrying his child. The Dragon's claws rip out through the skin of his fingers, and he tears the bloody fetus out of my body. It's the next Moon Child. Kill it, kill it quick, I want to say, but all sound has been howled out of the world. Then I look at the face and it's Shana.

After that, the dreams about the dying Dragon don't seem so bad.

In the end, though, my hearing and my strength come trickling back. The burns and the gashes from broken glass heal over, white and lacelike. What never fades is the taste of blood and ash.

It seems I sleepwalk, too. I wake up most mornings at the foot of Queen Theresa's bed with no memory of going there. The dagger-toothed grin I used to wear for politics is gone, but so is my roar. Now I skulk around in corners, glaring tatters into anyone who crosses my erratic path. I don't even mean to, but the eyestrain and the constant hammering echo of _you-did-this_ don't leave me much choice.

Wink says, during one private breakfast in the Queen's chambers, "This is the quietest I have ever known you." I throw my teacup at her head. Thank Soa I miss.

A number of times I find myself standing at the base of the cracked crystal stair that leads to the throne room, to the shattered relics of the old Palace. Time warps, and I'm caught in the days of the Dragon's attack, just returned from the unholy ruins of Kadessa with the Dragon Block Staff. I'm afraid I'm too late and the Queen and Shana-who-looks-like-her are dead up there.

I grind the heels of my hands into my eyes and return to the present. Something rattled loose inside my skull when that Dart-monster howled. I can't find myself anymore.

Less than a score of people are aware that I had returned to Deningrad in one piece, and not alone. The story goes that I encountered some beast while in the mountains and came limping home like this. Of course, it's nonsense. A Dragoon could pick her teeth with the bones of anything up there. Still, it's better than the truth.

"Miranda," Wink begins carefully on another occasion, after watching me hurl a book across the sitting room, "did Dragoon Dart…"

She doesn't finish, probably because I hunch up my shoulders and give my best impersonation of a hackling wolverine. I have no intention of letting her know that the legendary hero became a monster that could have picked its teeth with _me. _The most anyone knows is that he's gone and my room was on fire, with me lying deaf and paralyzed in the middle of all the broken glass.

If I couldn't save Dart from the monster inside him, at least I can still save him from public fear and loathing. He sold his soul for those fools out there.

Wink in particular can't be allowed to know. She can't know that Dart lost himself inside the soul of the Divine Dragon, because Lloyd was the one who carved it from the dying Dragon's eye, and she thinks Lloyd fell to his death in Vellweb. I never told her about the Moon.

Meanwhile, I can't _help_ but know. I wish I could persuade myself that what I kissed and awoke and failed to restrain had been part of some fever dream. When I couldn't breathe anything but the ashy air from his lungs, though, I must have breathed in a little of his soul. I _feel_ the Divine Dragoon out there, as bright as the Northern Lights, like a wind that leaves me alone shivering. Feeling him out there, I wake up each morning and fall into nightmares each evening completely aware of what I've done.

At least he stays far from my city.

Bishop Dille pays a visit. He prays blessings over my recovery and thanks Soa for giving the Queen such a brave warrior for a daughter, while I pretend to be sleeping. I keep my lips clamped shut on the truth and scream on through the nightmares.

I go through the motions of each day like an automaton—like one of Savon's addled little machines. I told that infernal Buckle during his so-called test—funny the memories come back now—I wasn't ready to die yet, because I had so much left to do. Now I'm not sure why I didn't just wind down and expire with the rest of the automatons in Aglis. I've botched everything.

With thoughts like this carving ruts in my brain, I'm not in the best of moods the day that someone says I have a visitor. It turns out to be Meru.

"She said she heard Dart had passed by Deningrad," the pageboy reports.

As himself or as the Divine Dragoon? Probably the former. "Did you tell her he's not here?"

"Your grace, I wouldn't know what to say to a Dragoon."

Tell 'em you're glad you're not in their skin, the sullen part of me answers silently.

I limp down to the sitting room, my burned soles still tender and oozing. Meru is, for the first time I've ever seen, wearing warm clothing—a gaudy sky-blue cloak draped over something tangerine-colored that still shows a lot of leg, a lot of midriff, and quite frankly a lot of everything else. She's finally traded out those flimsy Tiberoan-style sandals for boots. The heels bring her head almost to the level of my shoulder.

That poor sap Guaraha is with her, though it takes me a second to recognize him without the long hair and barn-owl robes. Red is a bad color for him. The skin over his nose and cheekbones is white and peeling—hers, too—which must be how Winglies sunburn.

When I come in, he is seated on the low-slung couch, long legs folded up almost to his ears. Meru stands rocking back and forth on her heels, giving the squint-eye to the portraits lining the walls. She turns to me with a skull-cracking grin. "Miranda, you crazy ol' coot, look who's turned up to brighten your day! Didja miss me?"

I drop into the nearest chair before she hugs me. "The time just flew," I answer dryly.

"How've you been? The city's looking great, innit? Hold on, I can't talk when I'm dying of thirst," she says, although she seems to me to be doing well so far. Sticking her head into the hallway, she bellows, "Honored guests require champagne on the double!"

Champagne? I peer at her under the shade of my hand. She looks like a twelve-year-old. "Meru, when did you start drinking alcohol?"

"Oh, you know, the glamorous life of a dancer," she comes back airily.

"Meru has been drinking rather often," Guaraha chips in. He looks haggard.

Meru plops down beside him with a hard little smile, then plants a smack on his sunburned cheek with more frustration than fondness. I'm familiar with the weariness with which he takes her hand. Guaraha is standing by Meru the same stupid hopeless way I stood by Dart—as if, with enough love, he could hold her back from what she's bound and determined to do. I hope he gets out alive.

The champagne arrives. She drinks three quarters of the bottle and sends for another before I've finished my first glass, each gulp sending her voice higher and more brittle, like breaking glass. I'm fairly certain that Guaraha empties his into a vase.

They've been all over Endiness, I hear, from Furni in Mille Seseau to Lohan in Serdio. They stopped by Seles to visit Dart, her "best buddy," but found out from the people there that he had left a few months back. Since then, they have been following his path in a leisurely sort of way.

Meru's dancing career is no longer a joke among the Dragoons, but a reality. She bills herself as the Mysterious and Beautiful Princess of the Sea, Guiding Inspiration of the Famous Dragoons, and puts on a show wherever she can find two square feet of stage. Guaraha carries her luggage and collects money for tickets, although I'm not sure how much money that could possibly total up to be. Still, her clothing is not cheap—and neither is booze.

"You're actually transforming in front of everyone? How can you do that on command?" I ask quickly during one of her rare pauses for breath. I eye the champagne. If the transformation comes as easily as a glass of liquor to her, when I can't find the Dragoon in me at all… The thought makes me feel a little dizzy, a little insane.

"Of course not. Not unless some big ugly's comin' after me."

That fits with what I remember—the soul of the Blue Sea Dragon inside of her only responds when its own life is threatened. Transformation went a little differently for each of us. I don't remember it ever mattering much whether I was in danger, as long as someone else needed me to be the White-Silver Dragoon.

Meru continues, "I do fly a little, though. Wingly, Dragoon, what's the difference? _They_ don't know."

To demonstrate her skill, she leaps out of her chair and walks on her hands along the back of the couch, kicking her boots in the air. Guaraha stares at the floor, his muscles tensing every time her balance wavers. Without asking, I see how their year must have been: Meru wheedling and careless, dragging Guaraha along on the leashes of his heartstrings, dancing in her provocative little ribbons and slurping down all the free booze men send her way, while he stands in the back to stare at her with his heart dripping out of his eyes.

"I can't wait to show Dart my new moves." Her words are beginning to come out sloppy around the edges. She does the splits, inverted in the air. "I bet he's never seen anything like me. His eyes are gonna pop right outta his head!"

Disgust with Meru's antics, pity for Guaraha, and this tangled-up notion of protecting Dart coalesce into something hard-edged and cruel. Interrupting her, I say. "When Dart left Seles, he came to see me."

"What?" Meru cartwheels down from the couch, misses her landing, and smacks onto her bottom. "Ow! Soa's toes, why'd he come to _you_?"

_Because he needed me—needed the Dragoon in me to save his wife and save his soul._

My intention was to slap Meru down with her irrelevance to Dart's life-the only weapon I have against her. I'm too choked by the nearness of my nightmares to follow through. As soon as I spoke, I remembered Dart standing at the edge of Deningrad, waiting for me as if I were his only hope. I remember how he kissed me and how he howled, and how both came out of the same awful speechless _need_ that sucked the breath right out of me, then abandoned me in the gasping void of his agony.

While my inarticulate jaw clenches, Meru regains her seat. "What did he want? Is he still here? I bet he thought I was in Mille Seseau. Did he talk about me?"

Statues speak more often than Guaraha. When he does, it's startling. "Sacred Sister Miranda, have you been unwell?" He makes an abortive gesture towards my bandaged hands."

My tongue loosens. I give them the same lie I gave my Sisters. "We woke up an old monster—something that escaped the Moon. He's gone to—to deal with it."

Meru burrows her shoulders into the cushions. "Oh, is that all? Dart can handle it. But he shoulda waited for me so we coulda made a whole party outta it. He has fun beating the snot outta monsters when he doesn't have Shana to worry about." Her eyes pop. "Gods! Did they split up? Is that why he's looking for me? For crying out loud, Miranda, you shoulda said something if…"

Drunk, she's almost shouting. I cut her off with a hiss.

"Shana's _dead."_

That sucks the inebriated wind out of her sails. I sip my champagne, both to take the raspy edge out of my voice and to fight back the dangerous wet heat in my eyes. We're at a loss. What can anyone say to this? What can words do? I want them to leave, but we're trapped by this silence, by battles shared and bonds even I can't deny.

"Gods," Meru says again. "Wow."

Guaraha bows his head, touching his fingertips to his lips. "My condolences for your loss, your grace."

"Yeah. Wow. I'm sorry. That sucks. Poor Dart! What happened?" I shake my head, unable to explain. She makes up her own mind—I don't know what she imagines would be a fitting end for Shana, what would take her from this world. "How long ago?"

"Just a few weeks. We burned her body in the mountains."

Meru clicks her lacquered nails against the bowl of her glass, while my hands clench slowly around my own. Guaraha looks like he has something prickly caught in his gullet. "Poor Dart," Meru repeats. "When's he coming back? I bet he needs some cheering up."

My heart thumps. How can she help him when I couldn't?

For her shallow soul's sake I hope it's just the champagne that makes her add, "I never really thought they made a good couple, you know? Shana was a total sweetheart and all, but don't you think he deserves someone a little more… adventurous?"

I follow her sidelong glance to that sickly milkwhite Wingly boy, the one I scarcely recognized with his hair chopped off and spiked, the one she's decked out in cherry red, and finally I see what she's done to him—in whose image she's remade him.

Anger boils up like thunder in my ears. My head feels swollen and heavy. I'm on my feet. Two smooth, white faces turn upward like flowers to the sun. The words barely croak past the knot in my throat.

"Dart loved Shana more than a stupid self-centered chit like you could ever understand."

Behind me, someone inhales sharply. Wink stands in the doorway, her hand still on the latch. Come to bestow her grace on this reunion, come to torment herself with pale sharp faces like Lloyd's. She heard.

The wineglass is still in my fist. I fling it to the floor for good measure and stalk out.

Queen Theresa herself comes to fetch me out, the next day, during the quiet after the noon meal. Setie's door has no lock, like my old room had. Only the black wall of my mood has maintained my solitude. She walks through it like love itself and enters my lion's den unafraid, with Wink and the Commander of the Holy Knights at either hand to steady her.

She finds me huddled in a nest of battered pillows and Setie's stuffed toys, my eyes on the sky. I've left the window open in case a wandering osprey-ghost finds me, but there is nothing to see but the empty sunlight slowly melting the walls. When I hear her slow, measured tread, I tense, biting the inside of my cheek until my mouth fills with blood.

"You may wait outside," she says—to the Commander, I assume, but Wink leaves with him. She takes a breath at the door, as if to speak, but when I peer her way in the corner of my eye, I'm too late to see anything but the long golden braid lying between her shoulder blades.

The Queen picks her way through the chaos I've made of Setie's room. I watch, my heart in my mouth, afraid she'll fall. My arms and legs are like lead. I don't think I've moved since I fled here. My instinct to protect her is chained down by the weight of my shame. She reaches my nest without stumbling, and I breathe again.

She speaks softly. "Your friends, the Winglies—they are staying in Deningrad for the Feast of Saint Miranda. They send their wishes for a speedy recovery. The young man was concerned that you were affected poorly by their visit."

I blot my bloody lip. "He's not the one Wink loved."

"I remember Lloyd well enough, dearest."

She sinks gracefully down beside me. Blindly, I curl toward her, my head in her lap like a child. She smoothes the burned, shorn-off remnants of my hair that leave me looking more than ever like some half-starved wildcat. "Miri," she murmurs, her tenderness scalding, "my precious child."

She says no more about Meru or Guaraha. She doesn't ask about Dart and what really happened the day my room became a furnace, why I scream myself hoarse in the middle of the night and jump at shadows. No, she strokes my hair and face and says, "You stay inside the palace all the time. I worry about you," and she isn't thinking of the weeks since Dart left, she's thinking of the years I've spent under the shelter of her love.

Mille Seseau doesn't appreciate the treasure it has in Queen Theresa. Who else could take the heartbreak of the murder of her offspring, the betrayals by consorts and lovers, and rise again with a heart as strong as it is generous? Who else could stand up under the crushing weight of a struggling country's demands as gracefully as if it were a crown of feathers?

Saints have come to life in my foster-mother and my borrowed Sisters. I want to cry for my debt to them. But crying is a relief out of reach—like the soul of the White-Silver Dragon.

I take her little bird-hands and promise, "I'll try."

Probably I grip too hard, but she doesn't mention it. She kisses my temple, and chuckles when my stomach suddenly growls. Her visit, waking me back to myself, has reminded me that I haven't eaten since the day before.

"Next week is the Feast of Saint Miranda," she says, in case I have forgotten. "The Commander of the Holy Knights has asked if he may have the honor of standing by my side."

The Feast of Saint Miranda, blesser of the earth, bringer of life after the long northern winter, is the first holy day of the summer. This will be the first opportunity for many citizens to see their Queen since the previous autumn; her fading condition has kept her from public ceremonies since the warm days ended. The icy winter and pallid spring would have been the death of her.

Traditionally, a Queen of Mille Seseau has her consort to stand on her left during ceremonies, protecting her from ill fortune—and assassins, if need be—but Queen Theresa only has me, her half-mad, half-singed foster child. I have stood beside her ever since I was twenty and killed the lying bastard who'd been her consort after Louvia's father died. For this particular saint's day only, the one I loathe and dread, I usually arrange to be absent. As long as I am here, though, trapped in this crystal cage, no one will steal my place.

Jealousy overrides my cowardice. This I can do. "I'll be there," I mutter.

Thank Soa all I have to do is stand there and look respectable. Even so, the helter-skelter of trivialities (arranging guards in parade uniform so they don't get in the way of Bishop Dille's acolytes, but can still maintain control over the crowds that will flood Mille Square—having every gutter in the streets swept clean—searching every bouquet of ceremonially appropriate flowers for spark-bombs—not to mention refitting my dress clothing to account for the fifteen pounds that melted off my bones) fills my echoing head until I have no time to spare to think about Dart and the Divine Dragon, and that's one drop of mercy.

The other comes from Wink, and it tastes like guilt.

On the morning of, the palace maids corral us in Wink and Setie's room to have an easier time dressing everyone. My Sisters look like summer personified, in green and gold and white. I tower over them like gloom itself, in the black military coat of the Queen's consort, which is embroidered with gold and edged with fox fur and swelteringly hot.

A maid cuts short my towering, knocking my knees out with a stool so that they can weave a crown of barb-edged roses through my hair to mirror my Sisters. Wink's golden locks are combed and pinned, Setie's curls like a cherub's, and Luanna's hair shines glossy black, but my hair is too short now to cooperate. After her third attempt leaves me looking like a weedy haystack, the hairdresser throws her hands up and gives me such a _look_ that I finally crack.

My hands fly up to rip off the crown of roses. Quick as an arrow, Wink—half laced into her sleeves—ducks out under the fingers of her attendants to grab my wrists.

"She's doing this _for you, _Miranda," she says, meaning the queen. She says it low and quick and hard.

I leave the flowers alone.

But the little vicious beast of panic has been unleashed. It races through my mind, screeching, throughout the ordeal of fitting gloves over my burned hands and daubing paint over my scars. When we assemble at the gates of the Crystal Palace and the Queen, touching my cheek, says, "my beautiful Miri," panic peels my lips back and bares my teeth in a wild-eyed grin.

It's not too late to put the tiered crown on Wink's head and send her out instead, if the Queen faints now. I would carry her back to safety for both of us. I think I still can.

Queen Theresa is strong. We go to face the world.

Mille Square lies half in the shadow of the Crystal Palace. The shadow was longer before the Divine Dragon broke free, the day I first met Dart. At the far end stands the Church of Soa, with its great stained-glass window displaying the image of the Divine Tree over the heads of anyone passing through the square.

Today, the square is cleared of the usual riffraff of hawkers, beggars, and goggle-eyed country-folk. Baskets of roses and wildflowers, Saint Miranda's emblems, hang from vine-wrapped poles that have been erected every ten feet around the perimeter. Beneath them, the streets are full to bursting with citizens and celebrants. Women in white, the Acolytes of Soa, hand out slices of apple, each with one of Bishop Dille's priests beside her, chanting blessings.

Dille himself, with the Divine Tree embroidered on the back of his robe with branches running down his sleeves, tries to catch my eye as my Sacred Family proceeds into Mille Square, with the Holy Knights making a wall around us and a herald bleating out our presence on his trumpet. I haven't been to the Church in months; we haven't spoken since Dart carried Shana into Deningrad, to me.

I evade his gaze and take my stand beside the Queen, in a scaled-down throne on a dais behind Bishop Dille. My Sisters sit behind us under a flowering trellis. The Knights adopt a formation below the dais, gently repulsing the attempts of the crowd to reach the Queen. I jut my jaw like the Commander of the Holy Knights, refusing to look at the throng, a far cry from the Saint my bitch mother named me for.

As a holy feast, this is Bishop Dille's day. The Queen and the Sacred Sisters are only guests of honor. Once we are arranged, he begins the recitation of Saint Miranda's gifts.

"She upon whom Soa smiled, who smiled upon us in turn, the rising sun at the cessation of winter's dark, the bringer of life to the barren lands, the herald of spring…"

Irony—even of the poetic style—never much penetrated his conscious, and within five minutes of his benediction he mentions how blessed we are to have one favored with Saint Miranda's own name keeping watch over the nation. I can barely draw a breath under the weight of the stares. Wrapping my fingers tighter around the hilt of the ceremonial broadsword, I try to remove myself from all of these blank stranger's faces.

But nowhere is safe for me.

Especially inside my mind. Without even the light of the White-Silver Dragon to comfort me, it's like a graveyard, and in any grave lies another of my failures. There's my father the drunk and my mother the bitch, and an old Wingly man with all of his little automatons powered down and dead like satellites around him. A great big mausoleum stands where, in my imagination, Queen Theresa is already lost to me. Over it all shines the light of a funeral pyre, up on the rocks by the glacier.

There's nowhere to run because at every step the ground crumbles to dump me in with the bones of every time I've let someone down when it counted, every time I used fists or the hard edge of my tongue on someone who deserved better. There's never enough graves to hold them all, and the ground erupts with death, defeat, and despair. No one would ever dare follow me here, deep inside myself. How dare I ask for love with a soul full of cemeteries?

Now above it all, I hear the rush of beating wings, and the Divine Dragon howls. Through the thunder it sounds like _you did this_, and it's true.

Named for Saint Miranda, blesser of the earth! My eyes burn. I'm cruel, I'm a coward, I'm a mad dog someone should have put down long ago, because I bite and I bite and I can't stop biting. Even if I tried to stop, it would only be a matter of time until something else, something bigger takes a bite out of me in turn. Don't trust me! Don't trust me or I'll bite you too!

Look what I've done to Dart and Shana, look what I've done to Queen Theresa, to my Sisters, and now who will Wink rely on? Why was I born just to destroy what I love? No just God would have made me, there are too many monsters in the world for one to wear human skin, and now my eyes feel hot and wet and there are so many faces, they all blur together and all I see are open mouths and though I can't hear them through the ringing of my ears, I know what they say because I hear the accusations waking and sleeping, always rattling in my graveyard head, and there is

_someone running toward my Queen._

And in that instant all the graves shake and gape open, and all my guilty skeletons crumble to dust in the flash of here and now. The world inverts, black to white and gold to silver, and the sun itself dims. My bones groan, my heart erupts, my body nearly turns inside out before the light at last bursts out of me—the white fire I thought the Divine Dragon had extinguished forever.

There's pain, so keen and exquisite that no atom of Miranda is spared. Then I am the Dragoon wholly, and all pain is forgotten.

Weightless, I hang in the air above a crowd of humans more ugly, fragile, and shallow than they can comprehend. My arms are sword and shield. My wings are sunlight, dripping tiny stars. At my feet lies the man who broke through the perimeter of Knights and up the steps of the dais to threaten the Queen. His blood runs like filigree through the grooves of my armored flesh.

The world moves very slowly. I'm above and beyond it, the weight of death and time and gravity sliding away like shadows. I see the gaping mouths but all I hear is the soul of the White-Silver Dragon singing inside of me—the song of life.

I look again at the dead man. His eyes glaze over. The Commander of the Holy Knights bends over him, replacing the man's fistful of roses with a knife, before the crowd notices. A simple admirer.

I just killed an innocent man, I think, very calmly.

The Commander steps back, gesturing to me. The lips of the people move, in the silence beyond the Dragon's song. Their fists pound the air. They're _cheering_.

This is the first they've seen me for what I am.

I look to my family and see in their faces unprecedented awe. They've never really believed in the shining monster I became when the Dragoons came to Deningrad. Now it stands before them, an unholy miracle made flesh. The Queen clutches her hands over her withered ribs, she's crying, she's praying. Wink is down, dragged by Setie to her knees. She looks so young.

Miranda—her lips form words that don't reach my ears, drowned out by the Dragon—I never knew.

The realization of their doubt should have cut me like a wire, but there's no room in this transformed heart for anger or doubt. From my guts to my fingertips I am full of loyal, pitying, _maddening_ love.

I stretch out my arm and fling the bloodied sword away. It arcs through the air to smash through the great stained-glass window of Bishop Dille's church, the culmination of my months of secret small vandalisms. The musical destruction of the image of the Divine Tree as it tumbles down in eleven thousand shards of brilliance is the first sound to reach me through the dead Dragon's voiceless glory.

Luanna is the only one of my Sisters on her feet. She lifts her hands blindly to me, like a prayer. I fold my wings and drop down to the dais beside her. Only half knowing what I am doing, I take her face between my palms and kiss her eyelids, one then the other, and the Dragon's burning silver tears run out of my eyes and over hers.

"Saint Miranda!" people scream. The cheers swell and crash around us like breaking waves. For the first time, they call my name with love, and I don't care. All I see is my faithful Sister.

Luanna reels back, hands over her face. She stumbles and falls to her knees. Shaking her head over and over, she looks up_. _Her eyes, gray as moonbeams, gray as silk, fix on me with certainty. Her pupils contract against the brightness of my shining.

When her eyes meet mine, a lifetime of insecurity and guilt melts away. Out of the angry hurt in me, something good can still arise.

I am no worthy Sister, radiating wisdom, grace, or purity. I am no admirable hero with victory medals shining on my breast. Still, I _am_ the White-Silver Dragoon, and that is more than anyone in all of Endiness can say. I'm a faithless saint and a holy monster, but there's no leash that can hold me. This isn't my cage; it's my den, my aerie, and I will slaughter anyone who threatens its security. These four women before me are the ones I love, the ones I'll fight and kill and die to protect, whether or not they've called on me or believed I would.

And somewhere in a faraway darkness is someone else I love, whose cry for salvation rattles down my bones. I've been a coward too long. There's no more room in this white-hot heart for hesitation.

From the inside out I am transformed by the Dragon's light. It fills all the dark empty places and the tombs within me with a brightness even greater than before. With no more pain, I see and understand. The way stands open before me, with no more locks or bars. I see now how to keep my promises—how to redeem myself _to_ myself, in being what I have become.

For over a year, I've wrestled with the heresy of my own existence: a half-human, half-monster abomination for whom the Church of Soa holds no answers. I killed a god and shattered fate and lost myself drifting in a world with no more reasons.

Now, in the falling shards of Bishop Dille's window, I believe again. There is a place for me and my Dragoons in the unwinding of the ages. There is a fate for us that was never unwritten. The Church has no room for the tangled soul in me, but the Creator's will goes beyond the texts and scriptures. I believe because I see that I am blessed.

Only as a Dragoon can I keep my oath to Queen Theresa and to Wink, to protect them against the whole world.

Only as a Dragoon can I keep my word to Dart Feld, to protect him against the godforsaken thing inside him.

The word 'miracle' sweeps through Mille Square in a wildfire of whispers. The First Sacred Sister has healed the eyes of the Second, with a touch. The crowd crushes forward, like floodwaters spilling over a dam, clamoring for the touch of holy hands. Bishop Dille and his acolytes are swept up and lost in the torrent. The Commander of the Holy Knights shouts to his men, placing himself on the steps of the dais, between us and the mob.

I feel nothing but the Dragon's melody of joy and triumph. I could destroy the mob in an instant, or cure them all, with equal indifference. But these people are not the ones with my heartstrings in their hands, not the ones I blaze to defend.

My radiant wings flash out in a halo of white fire, flinging sparks throughout the square. The onrushing crowd hesitates for fear of being burned. My supernaturally sharpened eyes catch sight of a woman on whom a spark landed. She gasps in pain—but the open sores around her mouth close and vanish. On others, bandages fall away from broken limbs, and pox scars melt away, leaving only the white star of a new burn. Far in the back, I see Meru fighting vainly through the crowd, Guaraha in her wake. The crystal holding the soul of the Blue Sea Dragon is dormant, hanging dully on her chest. She cannot follow me.

The first beat of my wings sends a second and final rain of sparks across the crush of humanity, while it lifts me above them. In the space of a heartbeat I am out of their each, and my family is safe from being trampled. I tear my eyes away from my Sisters' bent heads—two golden, one dark—and my mother's upturned face, her shining eyes running over with tears.

The compass in my heart commands me. I turn toward the north, and Dart.


	9. The Divine Dragoon

[A/N: Thanks for your patience in waiting for the rest of this story. The tone of the last two chapters was a beast to get right, and I didn't want to share Ch 9 until Ch 10 was almost ready. Everything is winding up for the conclusion, "in smoke and flame." I hope you enjoy reading Miranda's battle to save Dart from himself...!]

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**NORTH OF THE WIND**

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Chapter Nine: The Divine Dragoon

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_So silent, no violence_  
_But inside my head, so loud and clear_  
_You're screaming_  
_Covered up with a smile I've learned to fear_  
_Just sunshine and blue skies_  
_Is this all we get for living here?_  
_Come fire, come fire_  
_Let it burn and love come racing through_

[Lisa Miskovksky: Still Alive]

.

The soul of the White-Silver Dragon is a mother's soul. Its song is lullaby and birth-song and battlecry all in one. While I fly on its wings through these moonless skies, a trail of vapor shining for miles behind me, I remember my mother.

By the time I saw her, or the projection of her, on the Setting Moon, I'd been lied to a thousand times in half a dozen days. I'd been slapped in the face by the things I had believed, all my life, to be Truth. I had my faith trampled upon, and sometimes my own feet had done the stomping. When I faced her, my personal nightmare, I had nothing—no belief left to guide me through the maze of her confessions and accusations. Not even Queen Theresa and my Sisters, their love for me, could save me from the deepest darkness in my own heart. I don't think any other Dragoon was tested as viciously.

My only knife against the snares of guilt and hate had been the warmth of Dart at my back. He was the only witness to my weakness. I didn't _let _myself be drawn in and choked by the deadly thorns of the rose of my mother's so-called love, because that lost firebrand needed me. He needed me to stay with the Dragoons and take Shana back from Melbu Frahma.

After all this time, I've found my faith again. Now I remember that moment on the Moon, and I believe that my mother lied to the very end.

If she really cared about me, if she had ever meant to take me with her when she left my poor sad drunk father, she would have _made _a way to come back for me. That's what you damn well do when you care for someone. You claw your way through hell to get to them, or else these things we call hearts might as well be carved out and thrown on the ash-heap when we're born.

That's why I've got to go after Dart.

Hours have passed since Deningrad dwindled at my feet. I've never spent this long transformed, but the dragonsoul that fuels my flight hasn't faltered. It cradles me securely in its light. The setting sun turns the sky into a regal tapestry around me, and I soar unscathed through its flames.

I don't recognize the landscape flashing past below. Bleak wastelands, shallow pools turned bruise-bright with sulfur, greeny-black stony fields with leafless, bone-white trees. Nothing lives or moves for a hundred miles, except for a beckoning finger of smoke on the far horizon.

At the sight, my mouth fills with the taste of ash: the breath I drew in from Dart's lungs in the moment that the Divine Dragon's soul transformed him. I set that as my goal. Where else would I ever have looked for him but in smoke and flame?

Drawing nearer, the smoke isn't a tendril—it's a fat column, vast enough to swallow a city whole. Its oily darkness blots out the sky. I plunge into it like an arrow of white fire through a wall.

This is old smoke. It rises from flames that will never be satisfied until the whole world is a cinder. The smell is madness and despair. The weight of cinders presses me toward earth and the vast unmarked grave below me. The First Sacred Sister would lose herself in this blackness, but I am more than Miranda now. I am light and love and fury, and the darkness retreats from the sweep of my wings.

I feel the Divine Dragoon somewhere below me, where death glows red.

The smoke is too thick for even Dragoon eyes to penetrate. I reach up, to the sky beyond the black veil, and tear it down in fistfuls. Light falls like rain, piercing and burning through the murk. The world opens up, laying bare its wounds. I drift down with the cinders.

Steam belches through chasms, giant rifts torn through the flesh of the earth itself. I draw shallow breaths of scorching, sulfurous air through my fingers. The blistered earth is strewn with dark stones, split by the heat. Only when I notice the twisting relief carvings scrolling across the rubble do I finally recognize where I am.

Mayfil, the City of Death.

A shudder sweeps through me that even the soul of the White-Silver Dragon can't suppress. No wonder the air here reeks of torment.

When I came here before, chasing recklessly after the warped, evil being who had taken Shana to give birth to his new god, Rose had fallen back at the sight of souls swarming Mayfil's pits. She said her Dragoons, the first ones, had destroyed it once already. It rose again. I remember how wide her dark eyes had been in that thin white face. For once, she had looked young and scared. She was younger than me that day.

Now the whole accursed place, this outpost of hell, has been obliterated. Barely a single stone stands on top of another. The acid rivers have vaporized, leaving cracked channels through the ruins. Small fires continue to burn everywhere I look, although they should have run out of fuel long ago. Maybe they consume the souls that have been trapped here for millennia.

I feel sick: horrified, in my human weakness, both by the ghastly memories of this place and by the totality of its destruction.

The half of me that is dragon-soul and dawn-burning sees everything and nothing—nothing, but who I followed here.

The only living thing in this wasteland of suffering and destruction, the Divine Dragoon wades knee-deep in the ashes of Mayfil. It moves stiffly, hunch-backed, like an old man with bad joints, and its wings hang in tattered shreds. In its brutal claws it holds a skull, human-sized. It has worn a track, pacing through the rubble, leading to a heap of other skulls. There must be over a thousand there; the pile is taller than a normal man. The skulls all look feminine. The bones are sharp and fine.

It's searching for the Moon Child.

The rain of light and the dissipation of the choking smoke created a brief pause in its futile mission. I alight between the Divine Dragoon and the sad heap of skulls. It cocks its head at me.

"Dart, you won't find her here," I tell it. The dragon's voice inside my head is keening, flutelike; mine is harsh and ugly by comparison.

The monster before me, twelve feet tall, still wears Dart's face. Scales have spread like cancer across the scratched and sunburned flesh, covering one whole side of his face. One blue, human eye remains visible, sunk in a dark, discolored socket and so bloodshot that no white shows. Where its twin should be, the Dragon's slitted eye glitters at me from an armored ring. Five more eyes wink from his forehead and cheekbones. Slowly, it's reshaping his human features to be more like the dead dragon's own.

Is that recognition in its eyes?

No. It bares a mouthful of fangs and roars down at me.

Maybe it's because I'm in Dragoon form this time. Maybe it's because I know it and I've faced it before. Although I feel its hatred in every bone and joint, my hair standing on end, its spell of paralysis has no hold on me now.

I remember the first time I saw the Dragoon that came from this old monster's soul. Dart called it out—or maybe it borrowed his body—to execute the newborn God of Destruction. But it wasn't really the god itself, it was Melbu Frahma trying to make himself into the missing soul the Moon-born body needed. Shana had—no, was—no, _had _the god's real soul. If that soul had merged with its intended flesh, we wouldn't have stood a chance. Frahma gave us the keys to our own salvation.

This twisted Thing isn't really the Divine Dragon, and it doesn't have even half that creature's power. It's nothing more than a memory, a ghost, wearing Dart's body like a coat too small for it, ripping out through the seams of his humanity. It doesn't belong, and it's not undefeatable.

The echoes of its scream reverberate around the smoky wreckage of Mayfil. I can roar, too. Cupping my hands around my mouth, I shout back, "Howl all you want! I'm still taking Dart back!"

All seven eyes narrow on me. Fast as a cracking whip, it springs forward, swinging a door-sized claw. I'm too slow. It slams into me like a cannonball, and throws me head-over-heels. Earth and sky blur sickeningly. I crash into something hard, the enormous ribcage that once marked the mouth of Mayfil, which shatters and comes tumbling down around me.

I'm winded, but unharmed. The Dragoon armor absorbed the impact—or maybe there's too much Dragon winding through me to feel pain. All around me lie chunks and shards of blackened ivory.

I gulp air, swallow blood. The earth trembles with slow, heavy footfalls, drawing nearer. By my head, a shallow pool shudders: barely a foot across and tea-colored with acid. A reflection of the sunlight which I dragged down in my wake lies in the puddle like a wavering blade. I fix my eyes on it and wait, lying still as a broken damselfly, until the shadow of the Divine Dragoon falls over me.

It stoops down, grasping with giant, broken-edged claws. For a flash I remember how tenderly it lifted Shana in the cataclysmic death throes of the Moon and Melbu Frahma—how it held her, tiny and white and trusting, against its breast. Me, it will tear limb from limb for defying it, for failing him.

But I haven't failed yet.

It hauls me up by a wrist, and my moment comes. I plunge my free hand into the acid pool, seizing the crescent of light reflected there. The light comes up in my fingers as a shining blade.

I slash at the Divine Dragoon, and my fistful of razor-edged sunlight shears through its cracked and pitted armor like paper. It cuts deep through the layers of monster-hide, peeling them away. At the core of the gouge I have made in its arm, an inch of human skin is laid bare.

The Divine Dragoon bellows. Chips of bone rattle loose of the great, hollow ribs and clatter down. It flings me away. Something _pops_ in my left shoulder.

This time I am ready. My wings flick out, stabilizing me before I slam into anything else. I hover, staring down the monster. It crouches jealously over its heap of skulls, murder in its blazing eyes. From the white bones leap a thousand bright reflections, a thousand slaughtered children. I gather them up like arrows and hurl them at the Divine Dragoon. I want to burn it away and leave Dart standing there, free again. Sensing my intention, it springs into the sky. Vast, tattered wings pound the air, smothering me with the breath of opened graves.

I fling spears of light after it, but it doesn't turn. It soars into the bruise-colored clouds, like a nightmare under the setting sun.

I chase after it. The veil of smoke draws again over the ruins of Mayfil, hiding it from the world's eyes.

In the deepening twilight, the Divine Dragoon vanishes. I feel its flight like a hot breath against my cheek, but its speed is lightning and wildfire.

I keep on, while the night wraps around me like a cloak. The starlight clings to me, drawn by the dragonsoul that winds even more deeply around mine. Anyone watching the sky tonight must think they are witnessing signs and wonders. Maybe they are. Distantly, I notice that the scratches and bruises I took are closing and fading in the silver starlight—then I see the unnatural angle of my dangling left arm.

Dislocated. A funny little twitch happens in my stomach. Either adrenaline or the Dragon, running through my veins, has kept the pain at bay. I don't have the time to deal with it, not with the Divine Dragoon so near and now _aware_ of me. I remember too well the high price we Dragoons paid, all the long journey we took together, for being too slow and too late, time after time. It can be fixed later, once I have Dart's soul and mind back where they should be. I have the measure of the monster now, I won't let it strike me again, and _oh Soa now it hurts it hurts like hell._

I fold my wings and plunge earthward.

Below me is some body of water, a bay or vast lake, churned by deep purple waves. Light-headed, I land on a low spine of rock that rises out of the water. I drop to my knees. My wings scrape on the rock.

When I was a little girl, I fell out of a tree and popped my shoulder joint out of its socket. My father carried me to the Priest of Soa who lived near our village. The man, Brother Emmo, performed what seemed like a miracle to a very small child with leaves in her hair: he gripped my arm and shoulder firmly and snapped it back into place. All at once the pain lessened.

I don't know if I can fix myself the same way, but I don't see another option open to me. I've seen miracles. I take hold of my upper arm, take a deep breath, and yank.

Maybe the soul of the Dragon helped. Maybe Soa does listen to prayers. There is a grating sensation and another _pop_ that rattles through my bones. My left hand curls up in obedience to my command.

Then all the blood rushes out of my head and I pitch toward the stony ground. The world blackens.

I dream, thickly, as if through murky water. I _think_ I am human in sleep, but when my eyes snap open again to a gray predawn sky, the Dragon wakes with me. I blink, and crystalline armor races out from my core to cover me.

I've wasted several hours in a faint. The thought occurs that I haven't eaten, haven't slept, since yesterday morning. It leaves just as quickly. I push myself up, then reach for the sky. Weightless, I rise.

The transformation that occurred at the Feast of Saint Miranda hasn't ended. Has anyone ever lived and breathed in Dragoon form for this long? Yes—Dart has, now, and see what it's done to him.

Streaking through the pale sky, I stretch my mended arms in front of me. The Dragoon armor has grown thicker, glowing with a light that has nothing to do with the coming dawn. In contrast, the skin of my hands seems to have thinned, turning translucent, like tissue paper. Through it, my bones shine white. I touch my face. My hair clings to my fingers like cobwebs of spun gold. I wonder what will be left of _me_, if I continue to draw on the White-Silver Dragon inside of me.

The answer doesn't frighten me. I don't care if I lose myself in this. I'll give my soul to save Dart, and unlike Shana, I have a soul to spare.

Besides, even if I end up a Dragoon entirely, with no Miranda left, I won't be a monster. I know this soul now, as if with each hour I spend in its embrace, the boundaries between us begin to blur. It is not a terror, like the others. It is fierce and powerful, but it has no taste for violence. It knows no fear and remembers no enemies. If I never return to myself, if I am lost completely inside this shining, wordless creature from another time, it will still stand guard over the people I love. It will never hurt them.

No other Dragoon could say that. They all have a longing for blood or a hunger for victory that will twist and warp them.

I am being warped too, I'm sure, but it doesn't matter as long as it gives me strength to bring Dart back from the fiend that has consumed him. The White-Silver Dragon's blurred memories of a lost offspring interlaces with the images of Dart, my true friend, the lover I don't deserve and won't abandon. We have the same longing, the same purpose.

And the Divine Dragoon fled from us.

I'd like to think that Dart was conscious enough, inside all of the horror, to recognize me and choose not to fight, but there was no flicker of my friend in those eyes. When it took him, back in my room in the Crystal Palace, it broke me and left me to die. If the monster's reluctance to face me has nothing to do with Dart's mercy, then it must be running out of fear. Even the oldest of monsters is a coward before a mother's wrath.

I cry out, and the Dragon's song is in my voice. I will follow this inner compass into any nightmare, any darkness, to find where Dart is lost. I will burn down the sky to make the sun rise for him again. Dart and I have this in common: we'll turn back for nothing when we want something with all of our being, and what I want is Dart the way he should be.

The broad light of noon fills the azure skies when I feel the flutter in my heart, a certain shortness to my breath, that makes me sure that the monster is near. There is nothing around, though: only empty blowing sands, glittering like precious gems. No human habitations interrupt the barrenness below me.

The Death Frontier—Gloriano, they called it once, when it was beautiful. The Dragon in me remembers.

We are far from any ruins, though, and there is nowhere in the emptiness below me for the Divine Dragoon to hide—if it hid at all. I had expected to find something else in flames. Still, this is where I have been led. I hover, uncertain, feeling a chill as a cloud bank passes between me and the sun.

Then something like a house hurtles down to smash me.

I dart aside. The missile tumbles earthward. Carved stones fall apart, flaring briefly with magic runes. A jolt of memory strikes. I fly up into the underbelly of Zenebatos, the Wingly City of Law, the only one of their accursed ruins to still drift through human skies.

Of course. Dart's desire is for Shana, but the soul of the Divine Dragon wants to destroy. He told me so, months ago, before I was willing to listen. What it remembers most, and hates most, are the Winglies who bound it in that mountain for those endless years. It seeks out the remnants of that age.

With me on its tail, it hasn't had the luxury it had at Mayfil, to spend weeks meticulously leveling the abominable place. It had just enough time to burrow itself a hiding place, gutting the old buildings. When I reach the main level of the dead city, it bursts out at me. Liquid fire drips from its talons and wings, blackening everything it touches.

I skate a hairsbreadth ahead of its grasp, and we're off, wheeling through the floating towers and platforms in a deadly game of chase.

The noon light is my ally, glaring off the old stones in blinding sheets of white. While I fill the air with sunbeam javelins, the Divine Dragoon rips chunks out of Zenebatos and hurls them at me like meteors. The bureaucracy of robots goes into a tizzy, zooming around us with their tinny voices chattering, holding out pathetically small handcuffs.

I bat them away whenever I can spare a thought from the monster coming after me. Identical, mindless, they inspire none of the compassion I had for Savon's little automatons. When one gets in the Divine Dragoon's way, it is crushed like an empty canteen. Bits of machinery, crackling with vestigial magic, scatter from the monster's claws.

Dart was always quick. He was like a knife thrown straight down from the top of a tower, that's the best way I can say it. The Divine Dragon is fast, too. When it comes down to it, though, it has over twice the mass I do, and I've torn its wings to ribbons. On a straightaway, it would be the death of me, but I twist and bank around corners and dive faster than it can keep up.

The White-Silver Dragon's mind flashes with images of hunting, and its grin pulls back my lips. The dizzying heights of Zenebatos mean nothing to me now. I remember the weeks we spent racing Zieg—Melbu Frahma, though we didn't know it then—for the Signet Spheres, and how we'd been chased through this same floating maze by the same accursed little robots I scatter like ninepins now. We sprinted along crumbling spans, threw ourselves heedlessly through archways, to avoid being caught and dragged before the so-called court, where eleven thousand years of unchanged programming condemn human existence. The ancient paths gave way beneath me, once, and without a thought for his own life, Dart lunged to grab my arm.

There! I whip around one of the jutting outcrops of the Law Factory and almost shoot past a small alcove. Before the Divine Dragoon follows around the corner, I am hidden inside. It passes me, then doubles back.

Dart told me, back on the mountain, that his vision was altered by the transformation: everything dims and blurs, except for that which is magical. Like a White-Silver Dragoon hiding in an alcove.

It hisses, angling back toward me. There's a crack in the roof of the alcove, through which the noon sun pours in a single brilliant ray. I seize it the same way I seized the knifelike shine on the water, feeling it materialize in my palms. When it is within a claw's reach of ripping me from my hiding place, I catapult out, past its reaching arm. I drive the ray of light like a spear. It burns through the monster's shoulder and shatters. Without even a grimace of pain, it spins and slams one giant clawed foot into my ribs. I crash through the side of the Law Factory into a nest of little robots.

By the time I free myself, touching my ribs over and over to make sure that the Dragoon armor really did keep frail human bones from breaking, it's gone again.

I know its destination, though. It's backtracking through Dart's memories of the Wingly cities. We reached Mayfil from Zenebatos' transporter, and we came to Zenebatos on Coolon, who carried us from Aglis.

Aglis is where I'll find him.

Except that there is no Aglis, now. What's left of that city lies below the waves, and in it the bones of a very, very old and lonely Wingly, and all around him the husks of strange cheerful things that never had bones to leave behind.

It was good that the wild-goose-chase Zieg led us on didn't start with Mayfil. We couldn't have stood the grief and madness of all those siphoned, tormented ghosts so soon after the Black Monster and the Moon Child. That's another blessing I never considered before: that we started our final journey together at Aglis, a place where the world was still beautiful, where someone had continued to hope even after millennia of solitude.

The bay where Aglis sank is just a few miles offshore from the Rouge Isles, far southwest of the Death Frontier. I fly for almost a full day before my too-sharp eyes see the little fishing boats, the jungle-topped islands of Haschel's home.

The Divine Dragoon's presence is evident. Dead fish float, bulgy-eyed and white-bellied, on a storm surge crested with crimson foam. At its radius, a new island erupts from the sea, spewing molten rock. Black smoke and steam boils up from the poisoned waters.

It couldn't reach Aglis, so it will bury it.

The tug on my heart tells me that my monster is at the core of that ascending volcano. I soar upward, hiding myself in the pillars of flying ash and evaporation, then against the choked disk of the sun.

The island stops growing when is the height of a man, an ugly black spire. Toxic waves hiss against its red-hot shores. I wait. The Divine Dragoon emerges from the mouth of it, unharmed. Its head turns from side to side, scanning for me.

The spirit of the Dragon inside me moves. We dive in silence. Before the monster glances up, we blast it out of the air, into the sea. The water boils. It resurfaces, raging, and looks up to find the being that dared assault it. The instant it lifts up its face, I form a bow out of the cinder-speckled daylight. My arrow flies true. It pierces the monster's blazing right eye, surrounded by scales.

It shrieks, but isn't blinded. It has five Dragon eyes remaining, as well as Dart's one. It sucks in a breath and blasts a hot, poisonous wind to spin me away, tangling up my wings and searing my own eyes with involuntary tears.

I can't see. I can't evade the claw that tightens around me. The Divine Dragoon punches me through the churning waves, forcing me down into the deep. There is no air, no sound, no light. Death, cold and black, seeps into my ears, my eyes, my gasping mouth, my nose.

Somewhere under the water, I lose myself. First Sacred Sister Miranda vanishes. From the dark, the spirit of the Dragon rises.

The sun rises and sets twice, an afterthought, before conscious thought comes trickling back to me. Even then, I mistake myself for the White-Silver Dragon itself, soaring fearless above a younger and less broken world, one that hasn't yet felt mortal feet. My battle at Aglis with the Divine Dragoon is a confusing echo of other battles long concluded, lost amid the memories of a life that once stretched longer than all of human history.

Disorientations overwhelms me when I realize I have only human hands. By now, they are translucent as crystal. The blood of the monster stains them.

I grasp at threads of reality. Dart is my anchor. I fill my mind with images of him, burning bright as signal markers in my confusion. I remember his laughing eyes when he first came to the Queen, telling her the Dragoons would save her city. Back then, I thought he was arrogant. I came to see that his tactless pride was the confidence of a man who has already done impossible things. I remember, too, how little pride he has when it came time to be selfless. When rations ran short and someone had to go without, or when Meru complained of her blistered feet and begged to be carried—then he had no pride at all.

He always believed the best of people, too, no matter how many times he'd been proven wrong. He'd buy any drunk a drink. He's friends with Meru and me, for Soa's sake. He stood by Rose even after knowing who and what she was. He threw aside eleven thousand years of murdered infants, wanting to believe that his comrade's heart held no more darkness than his own.

He's single-minded and slow to catch on, and a completely insensitive clod some of the time, and he's a sore loser. He holds no grudges. He laughs like a kid and pulls his punches like a man who knows what the fight's really about.

I remember how recklessly he flung himself into Aglis, into Zenebatos and Mayfil, into the very heart of the Moon, because nothing there could scare him more than losing Shana. I remember how gently he picked her up when she collapsed in the Queen's solarium, that first day, and how his hands left bruises from holding her tight, all the way from Seles to the gates of Deningrad.

I remember the days we spent on the mountainside, stealing time, stealing smiles, stealing hope for each other.

I carry the warmth of his friendship inside of me, in a place that has always been dark and cold before. I have the sunlight shining on his chestnut hair, the calluses on his fingers, the freckles that appear when he looks at me so near, with his eyes like molten steel. I have the touch of his cracked, dry lips and his breath in my lungs.

He's a stupid man and a broken man, and brave. Most of all he is a _good_ man, and those are too rare for the Divine Dragon to have its way with him.

I don't know if these feelings are all mine, or if I stole them from Shana the same way I took the soul of the White-Silver Dragon. It doesn't change what I need to do. Despite all of his faults, for all of mine, I love him. That gives both of us a chance.

I don't ask for anything beyond his freedom. I don't expect him to fall on one knee or stay with me here in Mille Seseau, or even to say he loves me in return. If all we have between us are the days on the mountain, north of the wind, it's still enough.

By now I can't remember how long I've been chasing the Divine Dragoon—it feels like a lifetime. When the monster stole Dart out of my arms, though, it gave me the key to hunting it down. It pulls me to itself like a fish on a hook. The sense of its presence grows stronger with its fury.

The forest of the evergreens ripples below me, the ancient ruins of Kadessa glittering on the horizon. A thermal tugs at my wings. For a few heartbeats, a bird of prey soars alongside me, black- and white-feathered: the osprey. Its piercing eye gazes into mine. Then it rises on the wind and vanishes into the sun.

From here, on foot, Deningrad is several days' journey away. At a Dragoon's speed, it's a matter of hours. I won't let the Divine Dragon turn its burning eyes that way again. I will kill it here and save Dart.

Kadessa's ruins are unchanged. Nothing smolders or crumbles. A sense of watchful menace lies over it all, growing stronger as I approach.

In the center of the vast, timeworn coliseum, the Divine Dragoon sits, where a hundred million lives have been spilled out and absorbed by the golden stones. No bloodstains survived the centuries. Kongol felt it, though, and Meru did too. What I feel is only anticipation.

The monster waits. Its attitude is that of a predator lounging above a watering place. The wounds I dealt it continue to widen, as if the light still burns it, baring raw flesh underneath its armor. The arrow still juts out of its right eye. The five draconic eyes that remain, arrayed across brow and cheekbones, are closed. Only the human eye remains open, blue as metal.

I land on that side, where I can see a little of Dart through the nightmare. The sun has set, leaving the moonless sky blazing with stars. With a thought, the bow coalesces in my hand. I draw a shining shaft of light back to my jaw before approaching. It's gigantic, stretched out of human proportion, looming over me. I take aim at the glowing stone set in the creature's chest, and don't let myself think about what's happened to the human body at the core of this abomination.

The Divine Dragoon doesn't turn, but the five monster eyes open and swivel toward me. Dart's eye remains fixed ahead.

I'm not prepared for it to speak.

"Death," it says. "Agony."

In Dart's mouth, its voice is like dry bones grating together, the hiss of acid on naked flesh. It speaks like a mountain falling. I jerk, almost losing my starlit bow. It watches me, motionless, evil, and _sentient._

When I have enough moisture in my mouth, I say, "Is that a threat?"

"It is existence."

The dragonsoul in me rages, higher and higher. "You're dead and gone. You don't scare me."

"I ruled this earth when Humans and Winglies still dreamed on the branches of the Tree," it says. Its voice gets no easier to hear. Madness claws at my eardrums with each syllable. "Die now or die in your own time, but I shall crunch your bones."

It's insane, I remind myself—just the ghost of an old monster, even if it _can_ speak. Already it's lured me away from my purpose. I ignore the rising glow of its eyes and concentrate on the fragment of Dart that's still visible, gashed and stained with smoke, bloody-eyed and staring. The rest doesn't matter. "Hey, Dart," I call softly. "You didn't hear, but I made you a promise, back before Shana's heart stopped beating. I'm not letting this thing have you."

The blue human eye moves to my face.

I release my arrow straight up into the cloudless night. It blazes like a comet. Then, while the Divine Dragoon is still surprised, I step inside the reach of its horrible claws. I don't hesitate. I do what Shana would have done. I put my arm around the twisted, thorny monster.

With my free hand, I seize the Dragoon stone.

It howls, and I scream, because it burns like acid. But I don't let go. I dig my nails under it and _wrench._

Its claws sink into me, crunching my armor like dry shells. Now it comes, the rending of limbs from body. A film of blood runs down my breastplate from I don't know where. I set my teeth and pry at the hideous blazing stone.

Then the arrow I released into the sky returns, and with it all the pure white fury of the stars. Light rains down, drenching us, flooding the coliseum. Once more it screams, this time in pain. I wrap my arms around the monster, keeping it from fleeing. My wings furl around us both, trapping it in a torrent of light. It twists, struggles, roars, and I hold on, believing.

The light pierces its wings and burns through like a candleflame against oiled parchment. Armor and dragonflesh blacken and flake off in cinders. The monster's nightmarish hulk contorts, shrinking as it crumbles in my arms. Its sinking weight drags me to my knees.

The world quakes to the core.

Then silence falls.

Ash lies thick across the old ruins, drifting like snow under the stars. All monsters are gone, whether holy or divine. The White-Silver Dragoon has vanished. I'm just Miranda now.

Dart's arms tremble convulsively around me. His heart hammers against my chest. He smells like smoke and cancer. He's warm and human. His lips move against my neck. The faintest uncertain whisper emerges: "There's nothing left to destroy."

I shake my head savagely. "No. There isn't."

"Thank Soa."

We separate, holding each other's arms. His right eye and the side of his face is a weltering mass of bruises. The bloodstone of the Divine Dragon winks once and is extinguished, embedded in his ribcage in a knot of scar tissue. Other than that, he's filthy but unharmed. Our bones shine whitely through our skin.

His good eye searches my face. He lifts a hand that shakes like an old man's and pushes it through my matted hair, as if he's afraid of me. Then he crushes me against him until my ribs crack.

I cling to him, blinded with the prickle of tears, burying my face in his hair. I can't get enough of the heave of his living lungs against me or the rapidfire of his heart or the taste of his skin against my lips, because he's so real and so alive. I have no words.

For once in my life, I have done something right.


	10. In Nightmare's Wake

[A/N #1: If you haven't read the other chapters in a few months, I'd recommend you give them a quick reread before finishing the story. A lot comes together here that you might not expect or remember. The rest of the notes are at the bottom.]

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**NORTH OF THE WIND**

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Chapter Ten: In Nightmare's Wake

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_I felt it in my fists, in my feet  
In the hollows of my eyelids  
Shaking through my skull, through my spine  
And down through my ribs_

_No more dreaming of the dead as if death itself had come undone_  
_No more calling like a crow for a boy, for a body in the garden_  
_No more dreaming like a girl so in love, so in love_  
_No more dreaming like a girl so in love with the wrong world_

[Florence and the Machine: Blinding]

.

We're wrong, though. There is still one thing for the Divine Dragon to destroy.

There's still Dart himself.

Nothing opposes our limping descent from the Mountain of the Dragon's Tomb. Blessed Soa guides us safely down—I believe that now. At the foot of the mountain, we find an oxcart Deningrad-bound and climb into the back. The trees passing us on either side are dark smudges, the oxcart driver a man-shaped blur without a face. My eyes burn like coals. Dart's voice is a ragged ghost. When the soul of the White-Silver Dragon handed me back to my humanity, it left me hollow and dizzy. I feel both unbearably heavy and unthinkably fragile.

In my shaken world, Dart is solid and warm and alive. There is nothing in the night that can scare me again.

We doze, propped against each other. I rest my head in the hollow of his shoulder, and his cheek presses against my hair. Between us, our hands are locked together so tightly that our fingertips turn white. Maybe I am real for Dart, too.

In fitful moments of sleep, I dream that I am still searching. I jerk awake in a cold sweat. He understands and holds me close against his side. The Divine Dragon stone feels like a live ember, slowly burning through his chest. For a quiet moment, Dart leans his forehead against mine, and my nightmare subsides into peaceful delirium.

"Didn't even know how much I needed you," he murmurs hoarsely.

"It was Shana's Dragoon first."

"No, Miranda. _You _saved me."

If I were wiser, or less dizzy, I'd note the fever he is running. I can't even detect it behind the rising of my own.

There is too much to say, tangling up the breath between us, and all of it belongs to the category of things that do not fit easily into words. The next time I lurch, gasping, out of a nightmare, I tell him, "If you ever let that Soa-damned _thing_ get hold of you again, I will _kill_ you." Then I sock him in the arm.

Dart winces. We're both stiff and sore. "I think," he says wearily, "that's the sort of thing that only gets to happen once. Like the Setting of the Moon." Justice plays a part in Dart's view of world. Sometimes we just have to make it happen ourselves.

I fall asleep again with his knee pressed against mine, the heat of our fevers mingling, and my mind lost in what-ifs and second chances.

Lucidity comes and goes. At some point I recognize the sound of the evening bells from Bishop Dille's church, echoing against the ridges that surround Deningrad. Two helmeted heads hang over me, silhouetted against a fading sky. A torch comes close to my face. I fling up my hand and drop back into darkness. Then I am being helped into the Queen's royal carriage, semiconscious on my feet. It's night, and the streets are empty. I know the feel of the hand holding mine: Luanna. She is guiding me. Laughter bubbles up from some giddy place inside. After all these years, our roles have reversed.

"You're home now, Miranda," she soothes. Fingers like ice test my forehead.

My knees buckle. I sit down hard on the floor of the carriage. Something lies on the long cushioned seat behind me—a person—Dart. I find his hand and hold it tight. I don't want him to be alone, even in sleep.

In the opposite seat, a blur I had taken for part of the carriage leans forward. The cinnamon smell of incense surrounds me. "Your grace, the city has been in an uproar for days," Bishop Dille says. "The story of Sacred Sister Luanna's healing has spread all the way to Furni. Invalids camp in the streets, waiting for your return…"

He trails off when I shake my head, grinning to myself. Right now I can't bring myself to care about anything, other than the man I brought back from his inner hell. "It's all right," I tell them. "I saved him." Dart's fingers twitch against mine. Half-awake, as he was the night Shana died.

I remain half-aware of the carriage rumbling through the night streets, straight to the very doors of the Crystal Palace itself. Wink waits for us there, attended by the Commander of the Holy Knights. She gets under one of my arms and Luanna takes the other, and with their help I reach the second floor before I pass out completely.

The Commander and Bishop Dille are left to carry Dart. They are numb to what Luanna, with her uncanny senses, would have known in a heartbeat if only she had touched him. The Divine Dragon burns him from the inside out. His fever rises by the hour. Like a snake in a net, he slowly drowns in his own poison.

A little before dawn, he dies.

I know when he's gone. The breath of smoky air I once took in from his lungs rushes out of me in a sudden sigh.

I wake with the last of his breath leaving my lips, staring at the ceiling of the room as a soft gray replaces the blackness of night. The Crystal Palace is silent. A small emptiness burrows a hole just under my heart. The world feels colder. Why wouldn't it? A fire has gone out of it that cannot be rekindled. I'll never be warm again, I think.

My throat constricts. I bite my fists, strangling on the howls that can't come out. If I implode right now it would only be mercy. There's too much hurt to bear, too big a void inside to survive. My teeth grate against my knuckles. I slide off the bed and crash onto the floor. I wrap my trembling arms around myself, trying to crush myself out of existence.

Even broken hearts beat, relentlessly.

I don't die with Dart.

My muscles relax. I stare numbly at the tile floor beside my cheek, my eyes dry as two empty oases.

A wind whispers through the silent, closed room, ruffling my hair. Goose bumps rise on my arms. It smells like Serdio: fields and sunshine and apple trees. The first streak of pale light creeps along the wall. I watch until it touches the baseboard. Then I lift my head.

Lavitz's ghost kneels beside me, hand resting weightlessly on my shoulder.

"I thought I saved him." A whine creeps into my whisper, like a beaten dog.

"You have," Lavitz agrees gently.

My head thumps back onto the floor. My nails gouge angry holes in my palms.

"Miranda, would you rather that the Divine Dragon had run him to his death? That he'd died crazed, lost, and alone?"

"I'd rather he stayed alive!"

The quietness of ghosts goes beyond any natural silence. I see his hand tighten on my shoulder but feel nothing. "He died in peace," he says at last. "You've done miracles for us."

I squeeze my eyes shut. Something clacks softly down on the tile and rolls: the stone from the heart of the Divine Dragon, which I last saw embedded in Dart's ribcage. Lavitz brought it to me. I catch the stone and wrap my fingers around it. It's dead now, cool to the touch. I hope it never wakes again.

"Can I see him?" I croak.

"There's nothing to see but the body of a very brave and very tired man."

"I see _you._" Futile argument.

"He's gone on. You wouldn't want him still wandering the world, Miranda."

"Did you know? Did you know this was going to happen all along?"

"No." Lavitz traces phantom fingertips along my cheek: a faint tingle of sensation. "Weep for yourself."

I can't, though. The tears won't fall. They freeze in the backs of my eyes. I sit there in silence with the spirit of a dead Serdian knight, imagining Dart slipping away in the dark. I brought him all the way back from the precipice of oblivion only for him to die alone, just a corridor away. No one to hear his breath turn shallow, his heartbeats slow. Even when Shana faded into nonexistence, she wasn't alone.

It's not fair.

I look at Lavitz. The pale beam of dawn light illuminates the back of his head and shines through it at the same time. His face is turned away. "So that's it, then?" I ask him. Bitterness crackles like ice through my voice. "Shana's dead. Dart's dead. I guess the rest of us should just lie down and wait for our turn."

"If that's how you want it. But I don't think it is."

"Rose got to die with Zieg."

"But Claire didn't," he reminds me. He turns to me, and for all his gentle words his face is twisted with pain and grief. The jarring thought that a ghost can mourn his comrade's death disarms me. My anger with Lavitz is abruptly extinguished. Steadily, compassionately, he tells me, "It's your call from here."

For a minute we just look at each other. My fist tightens around the Divine Dragon stone. "Help me up," I say at last.

"You can't touch—"

"Lavitz."

For the past week, I've been more avenging Dragoon spirit than mortal. When I reach into the ray of light, my fingers are still translucent, with dark crescents of blood under my broken nails. Lavitz takes my hand. The absence of a beating heart is such a subtle thing, but it is all the difference in the world. His hand feels no more real than a soap bubble, but then he tightens it, and his calluses scrape against my palm.

He pulls me to my feet and steadies me when my knees start to buckle. I can't tell if he is more tangible, or if I am less so. Leaning on him, his arm around me, I limp to the window. I open the shutters and sit on the sill, indifferent to the height. The Serdian breeze that carried Lavitz's ghost whirls around us, with no one else awake to feel it. We Dragoons are always a long way from home, because there is nowhere we belong but with each other.

Below me lies my city, Deningrad, safe and unbroken. For the first time in my life as a Sacred Sister, the people sleeping down there in their cots and gutters revere me as well as fear me. As soon as they hear I've returned, they will begin begging me to heal them. It doesn't matter to them that Dart Feld is dead any more than it mattered that the Moon set. They are blind and deaf to the anguish of the world.

No—what they are is innocent.

It's because I protect them.

With the Divine Dragon stone still in one fist, I reach into my nightdress and wrap my other hand around the opal that holds the White-Silver Dragon's spirit. I've always worn it on a chain around my neck, one forged of steel so it can't be broken. Some of the other Dragoons wore theirs in plain sight, but I always hid mine. I couldn't bear the thought of theft or loss taking it from me. I saw what its absence did to Shana. I would be so fragile without it.

Lavitz spoke. "What are you thinking?"

"Luanna can see now," I answer slowly. "No one will ever dare threaten the Queen or my Sisters again, as long as I'm around. Shana's soul survived. Dammit, those are miracles." I tip my head back against the window frame, closing my eyes. "And I don't care."

Dart is gone. The one who understood, who cared—not loved, I won't lie to myself about that—the one who knew my fears and my anger and my ugly, selfish heart and still thought the best of me, has left me behind. When I thought the Dragoons had forgotten me he came to me, out of everyone else in the world. It was as if he came to save me as much as for Shana. I took him to my mountains, sheltered him in my sanctuary, let him into my heart and let him change me, and now he's dead and I'm alone.

Lavitz cups my face in his cool hands. Liquid brims in the corners of my eyes. It trickles down my temples onto his thumbs. "He's not the only one who ever has or ever will care about you."

I shake my head. "I believed because of him." I'm pleading. What good will it do? "And now it doesn't matter."

"It always matters," he insists.

I draw in a deep breath, then release it slowly. Breath belongs to the living.

The ghost's fingers run down my arms. He catches my bruised, gouged hands and holds them between his. We are the same: guardians of kings and queens, faithful friends who fell a little short of triumph. If I had been more like Lavitz, with my goodness right there on the surface instead of buried under the scars of guilt and anger, maybe I wouldn't have needed to hurt so much.

In Lavitz's hands, my fists are tame. The stones inside them are cold. I lean forward, resting my forehead on the knot of our hands. "Please stay."

He is silent. I jerk upright in time to see him shaking his head. The question _why_ is burning on my lips when he preempts it.

"Do you want to end up like Rose, Miranda? Caught between the living and the dead, barely able to tell the difference because you live for the past?" He shakes his head a second time. "You're meant for more than that. You're our bright and shining sun."

I don't know what to say. My face feels numb. A thousand years wouldn't be long enough—not eleven thousand. "So it's another goodbye," I mutter.

Lavitz catches my eye with the gentlest of smiles. The bloodstain blooms rose-like on his translucent chest. He sinks to one knee, still holding my hands. "Not forever. Time will pass faster than you think—when you live every day of it."

"Will you be there?" I ask, and I hate myself for how weak I sound, as he kisses my knuckles.

The sunlight is strong, he is vanishing, the words are a whisper. "I'll be waiting for you."

I'm alone.

The nightmare is over, and with it, the dream.

I sit there on the sill, too raw and tired to cry. When the quiet knock on the door comes, as I knew it would, I take it for the Queen. "Come in," I rasp.

The door opens. It's Wink.

I pull my knees up to my chest and cross my arms over them. The message she's come to deliver is written on her face. There's no teary redness around her wide blue eyes—she wouldn't weep for Dart—but a vertical crease mars her smooth forehead. She stops a few paces away, glancing from me to the ravaged bedclothes. She takes a breath, stops, and tries again.

"Miranda…"

Her hesitation pricks at my knotted-up heart. I lift my chin from my arms. "He's gone."

Her tensed shoulders droop. She nods. "I'm sorry."

Her golden hair is uncombed, a quilted robe thrown over her nightdress. She must have checked on him just after waking—always needing to know everything. That old complaint brings none of the usual resentment, since she came to me at once. She couldn't have known that I already knew.

We remain rooted in our places. The invisible wall between us looms, cutting off any further intimacy. I swallow hard against the lump in my throat, wishing it had been Luanna or the Queen who had come to tell me. I could have cried on their shoulders, mourned for Dart. In Wink's presence I am made of ice.

Wink rakes her hair back in a tired, almost frustrated gesture. Her hands twist together in front of her stomach. "I wish I knew what to say," she says, her voice almost too small to be heard. "I feel like I failed you."

Of all the things that could have come out of my Sister's mouth.

My hands clench around the Dragoon stones. Just before she came in, I had been thinking of the people in the streets, who flocked to Deningrad to ask me for miracles. They will be so disappointed. I don't expect to be called upon as a Dragoon ever again. I don't want to be. The mountains that used to be my refuge hold no interest for me, now that they're so haunted by absences.

Once, we Dragoons kindled each other. We rose, one by one, as Endiness needed us, monsters with human hearts to hunt monsters with no hearts at all. Rose woke a father's legacy in Dart—Lavitz followed, to guard Dart's back—Albert, Haschel, Meru, Kongol—little, gentle, lost Shana—and me, the last.

Now our fires are dimming, going out. Three are already gone. The time of Dragoons is ending. The last monsters in the world will be lonely ones.

When Wink knocked, I had been thinking: I doubt the newborn Princess Shirley of Serdio will have long with her father.

"The Queen used to tell us how brave and how strong you were," Wink says, the dry-eyed diplomat, even while her voice sounds small as a child's. "No one ever told me you were broken, too. I was so angry with you for that. I wanted you to be our leader, so I took all those diplomatic trips and left you with the Queen. Every time I came back, you gave back the authority. I had to make all the decisions and I thought you'd despise me if I asked for help. I couldn't talk to you without it becoming a fight. Everything I did pushed us further away." Her hands knot and unknot. "I just wanted you to like me.

"I thought this time you weren't coming back. That Soa had taken you away forever because we didn't believe. I've been praying you would return to us so that I could tell you how proud I am of you… how much I need you." This speech takes a lot out of her. She can't meet my eyes. "And even now all I hear is how selfish I am, because your friend is dead and there's nothing I can say or do for you."

With every word, the Dragoon stones grow heavier in my fists.

I have to make the time count. I never wanted to be a Sacred Sister, nor a Dragoon, but I won't let that keep me from people I love anymore.

I uncurl and swing my legs back inside the room. My bare heels thump down on the cold floor. Wink stands gazing at me, sad and vulnerable. That expression of pain and disappointment in her blue eyes, the one that's always there when she looks at me—it isn't _for_ me, it's for _herself. _And I never knew.

How many years have we wasted, holding back the things we've most needed to say?

"You never failed me," I tell her, and go on quickly before she can reply. "Listen, Wink, there's something I should have told you."

"Miranda, whatever it is, it's alright. I should have—"

"Lloyd didn't die at Vellweb."

Words die on Wink's lips. The color leaves her face. Her expression wavers between confusion and hope. I hold her eyes as long as I can, confessing the secret I've kept from her for over a year: that the man who broke her heart was, in the end, not unworthy of her love.

"I told you that after we faced him on Kashua Glacier, after you were stabbed, he brought us to meet his master. He showed no remorse for what he'd done to acquire the Mirror, or any of the other Moon Objects. Once he delivered it, his master had no more use for him."

I breathe deep—these memories are strong and fresh, rarely touched, and I can nearly feel the icy winds of Vellweb, the presence of my Dragoon comrades around me. "Lloyd wasn't like his master, though. He wanted him to let Shana go, not to harm her. And when he found out that the utopia he'd been promised came at the price of Endiness' destruction, Lloyd turned on him. Lloyd said that his utopia existed in the future of _this_ world. That was when his master threw him down."

I don't go into all the details about Emperor Diaz being Zieg Feld, Zieg Feld being Melbu Frahma. That part doesn't matter to Wink's heart. Whether Lloyd was redeemed does.

"We thought that he was dead. It was a long fall. But we saw him one more time… on the Moon. At the end of all things."

Wink fumbles for a chair. She sits abruptly, as if her legs have given up carrying her.

This is the part of the story I withheld. I hated Lloyd so much for hurting my family that I couldn't bear for Wink to think well of him. Loving Dart, even when he was the Divine Dragoon, has taught me something about believing the best of monsters. Wink deserves the same right to mourn hers as I do for mine.

There on the Moon, reality crumbled apart. We walked on what was not ground, we saw by what was not light, we heard what had no voice. It could have been a horrible dream, except for our scars.

"We reached the Moon too late. Lloyd's master had made himself a god that would end the world. Even with all the Dragoons together, we couldn't have stopped him at that point… and then Lloyd came."

Lloyd arrived like a flash of lightning. The whole time we chased Frahma from Signet Sphere to Signet Sphere, Lloyd had been limping his lonely way to the Divine Tree to wait for the inevitable confrontation. The once-charismatic Wingly was bruised, bloody, his armor cracked and crumpled from his long fall. He stood like a dead man. Still he defied Melbu Frahma, laughing as he did.

"Lloyd brought us the soul he'd cut out of the Divine Dragon. He gave it to Dart so that Dart could become something as terrible as what we faced. He gave our enemy everything he needed to destroy the world… then, when he realized what he'd done, he gave us everything we needed to save it." I show her the clotted-blood and old-bruise marble, the remnant of the nightmare we all shared. "Lloyd said that he couldn't die with Endiness in the hands of the wrong god. He told his master, 'There is no place for you in my utopia.' He took on this God of Destruction by himself.

"_That_ was when he died, Wink."

Her eyes are wet with tears, her mouth a thin white line. Spellbound, she hasn't stirred.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you before."

I give Wink silence. Sooner than I would have expected, she gives her eyes a careful dab with her sleeve and pulls herself up straight. " I understand why you didn't say anything before this," she says, looking at the corner of my jaw rather than my eyes. "I'm _not_ sure why you are now."

I think of Dart's fingers tightening around mine. "You deserve to make up your own mind about him."

"I see." I can't tell if she's angry until she brings her eyes up to meet mine. A sad smile hesitates at the corners of her lips, unable to come into full bloom. "Well, I want to hear what _you_ think."

Wink has never asked my opinion on anything. Perhaps that's been part of our problem. For a moment I'm tongue-tied. At last I find myself repeating his declaration: "There was no place for evil in his utopia. The actions he took to achieve it were monstrous, and he knew it, but in his heart, the dream was pure."

Wink is nodding slowly to herself. I can see her struggling to fit the piece that is herself into the puzzle that was the Wingly swordsman. "He said he had no reason to save me," she murmurs, "but he did anyway." She's never showed any uncertainty, any dismay, where I could see.

_I just wanted you to like me._

I wish I could have healed the rift between us at the same time that I healed Luanna's eyes, as simple as a touch of Dragoon light. All I have now are my own hands. It's past time to use them. I've been the First Sacred Sister of Mille Seseau for most of my life, but I haven't yet been a sister to my Queen's other daughters.

I crouch on my heels beside Wink's chair. My face is a little lower than hers, but this time I don't mind. What would I say to a little sister of mine? What would I have said to Shana?

Wink is patient with me. Maybe she is as apprehensive about sisterhood as I am, even having had Setie all along. Finally I say, "When Lloyd saved you from the bandits in Donau, it wasn't because you were the Third Sacred Sister. Yes, he took advantage of that later, but the first time, he didn't know. He was callous but not heartless."

Although I started out just meaning to soothe Wink's heart, it become true as I speak. "What I think is that he saved you because he didn't want everything good and innocent to get trampled by the vicious things of the world. Even if he was one of them." In my mind I see Dart punching Lloyd on Kashua Glacier, me punching Dart at Shana's pyre on the mountain. I muster up the bravest, truest smile I have for my Sister, my _sister_. "Lloyd saw that you had a good heart."

Tears run from the corners of Wink's eyes. She matches my smile tremulously. "It runs in the family," she murmurs.

Instead of wiping her own eyes, she wipes mine. I hadn't realized they were leaking. Then one of us reaches, and the other's shoulders fall, and we're embracing each other for the first time. Her back trembles with long-suppressed sobs. I tuck my face into her shoulder and let my own tears fall. I cry for Dart, for Shana, and for my own patchwork family.

When eyes are red and dry again, we sit with arms around each other's shoulders. Wink pulls my fingers back to see the Dragoon stones again. The power that shattered Deningrad and killed Dart is what Lloyd died to give him, the power to protect the world. All monsters for a reason.

I broke my heart for a young man who was blunt and clumsy and good-hearted; Wink, for an ageless one who was clever and beautiful and charming, with darkness at his core. In the end both of them were far too mortal.

"I don't believe in love." I say it quietly. The words hang between us.

Wink closes my hands again, hiding the Dragoon stones for now. "I understand," she says. "But it's because of people like you that the rest of us still do."

Is that true? I know she would not lie to me. I look out the window onto my city, onto a world that survived and people whose hearts still keep hope inside. Dawn covers Endiness with gold, until the light is all that I can see.

.

_FIN_

.

* * *

A/N #2: That's it. After a year and a half, "North of the Wind" is finished. Thank you for your patience; I hope you enjoyed the read, even if it didn't always go the way you expected. This story started as just a theoretical crack pairing-Dart and Miranda-and now it's become, for me at least, the only way I can picture events going after the end of the game. I can't imagine Shana and Dart living a long and happy life; I can't picture the Divine Dragon leaving its host alone; I can't imagine that all battles will be won and all scars healed. Most of all, I can't imagine a future devoid of tragedy. All I see is room for hope and love even within the pain.

Is it still a crack pairing? Yes-but hopefully one I justified as the story went on.

Again, thank you for reading. Even bigger thank yous need to go to Psi-liloquy and the anonymous Some Random Reviewer for writing such beautifully long reviews and inspiring me to keep going. The biggest of all goes to to Raindog Bride, who reads my scraps and drafts, makes sense of what I wrote when even I don't understand it, and throws around crack pairing ideas in the first place.

I have another one-shot to write (charting the lives of the other surviving Dragoons, as a sort of follow-up to North) and I'm still picking at First Dragoon, even if it's been a few months since I updated. There's always more stories to tell, even if this one has finished.

-KJ

* * *

_He was my North, my South, my East and West,_  
_My working week and my Sunday rest,_  
_My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;_  
_I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong._

_The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;_  
_Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;_  
_Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood._  
_For nothing now can ever come to any good._

[W. H. Auden]


End file.
